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About this guide

The Firebird 5 Quick Start Guide is an introduction for the complete newcomer to a few essentials for getting off to a quick start with a Firebird binary kit.The guide first saw the light as Chapter 1 of the Using Firebird manual, sold on CD by IBPhoenix.Later it was published separately on the Internet.In June 2004, IBPhoenix donated it to the Firebird Project.Since then, it is maintained, and regularly updated, by members of the Firebird documentation project.

If you notice anything missing, unclear, or outright incorrect in this document, please report it on the firebird-documentation issue tracker or submit a pull request fixing the issue.

Important

Before you read on, verify that this guide matches your Firebird version.This document covers Firebird 5.For all other Firebird versions, get the corresponding Quick Start Guide at https://www.firebirdsql.org/en/documentation/.

The Firebird Project

The developers, designers and testers who gave you Firebird and several of the drivers are members of the Firebird open source project at Google Groups, SourceForge and GitHub.The Firebird SourceForge address is https://sourceforge.net/projects/firebird/.The sources and issue tracker are hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird.At that site are the source code tree, the download packages and a number of technical files related to the development and testing of the code bases.

The Firebird Project developers and testers use an email list forum — firebird-devel Google Group — as their “virtual laboratory” for communicating with one another about their work on enhancements, bug-fixing and producing new versions of Firebird.

Anyone who is interested in watching their progress can join this forum.However, user support questions are a distraction which they do not welcome.Please do not try to post your user support questions there! These belong in the firebird-support Google Group.

Happy Firebirding!

Document History

The exact file history is recorded in the firebird-documentation git repository; see https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird-documentation

Revision History

0.3

2 Apr 2024

MR

Protocol names are lowercase (#205)

0.2

08 Nov 2023

MR

Remove mention that ServerMode is per-database configurable (it’s not)

0.1

07 Nov 2023

MR

  • Copied Firebird 3 Quick Start Guide as the starting point for Firebird 5 Quick Start Guide

  • Restarted the version numbering and cleared the document history, for older revision history, see Firebird 3 Quick Start Guide

  • Replaced references to Firebird 3 with Firebird 5 where applicable

  • Replaced qsg3 section prefix with qsg5

  • Removed UDF directory from disk locations

  • Removed references to WNET/NetBEUI protocol

  • Added security database upgrade instructions from Firebird 3 and higher

  • Updated SQL user management statement syntax to be more complete

  • Merged URL-style and TCP/IP protocol description

  • Added replacement images for Installer and Services on Windows

  • Installer no longer offers option to enable legacy authentication

  • Various copy-editing and textual tweaks