News

HQbird 2020 is released. Now it is simply the fastest Firebird

IBSurgeon is glad to announce the general availability of HQbird 2020. HQbird 2020 is the new release of the advanced FirebirdSQL distribution with a lot of new features:

  • Multi-thread Sweep, Backup, Restore (in Firebird 2.5 and 3.0, HQbird Enterprise only)
    • Sweep – up to 6x faster
    • Backup – up to 5x faster
    • Restore – up to 2x faster
    • Please note: to enable multi-thread features set in firebird.conf parameter MaxParallelWorkers=64 and restart Firebird
  • Speed-up heavy reports (up to 5x times) (Firebird 3.0, HQbird Enterprise only)
    • Queries with many fields in SELECT and large sorting (GROUP BY, ORDER BY, etc) can automatically use REFETCH plan to gain up to 5x performance
    • New parameter in firebird.conf to manage sort behavior
    • No changes in applications' sources/SQLs required
  • Encryption Plugin (3.0, HQbird Enterprise only)
    • AES256 strong encryption, for Windows and Linux, low penalty on performance
    • gbak with encryption support, decrypt low-level tool (for recovery)
    • Examples of sources for Delphi, NET, PHP, Java
    • Support of encrypted databases in HQbird
  • Authentication plugin for transparent Execute Statement On External (3.0, HQbird Enterprise only)
    • allows establishing trusted authentication of ESOE without password
  • RSA-UDR: sign documents (strings and BLOBs) (3.0, HQbird Enterprise only)
    • Public/Private Keys generation
    • SQL functions to calculate digest, sign documents and verify the signature
  • Enhanced performance monitoring reports (2.5, 3.0)
    • Low penalty on performance, easy to schedule
    • Top queries reports: time-consuming, frequent, CPU-consuming, disk, etc
  • Enhanced silent installation and registration – on Windows
  • Automatic upgrades of HQbird: checking and download
  • Control Center For Firebird (2.5, 3.0, for subscription customers only)
    • Review status of many Firebird servers on the same page
    • Notifications about successful backups and critical problems

The detailed description of HQbird 2020 features is available in HQbird User Guide https://ib-aid.com/download/docs/hqbirduserguide2020.pdf

Licensing

The existing subscription customers and customers with active maintenance will receive HQbird 2020 automatically in the next few days.

The customers with very recent purchases and customers from Firebird Developers Day 2019 (Brazil) also will receive HQbird 2020.

Upgrades

You can upgrade from any old version of HQbird to HQbird 2020: https://ib-aid.com/en/upgrades-ibsurgeon/