Most valuable new features in Firebird 2.0

Ann:
"Fixing indexes so garbage collecting records that participate in long
index duplicate chains is fast."
Thomas Steinmaurer:"Beside the ODS change in general (new index structures,
max. index length much higher, expression index, raised exception
message length, RDB$DESCRIPTION fields for other database objects, ...),
the following are on top of my "most valuable" list:

- Non-exclusive access when creating FOREIGN KEYs
- New database shutdown modes
- Sequence and new cursor syntax
- User-definable context variables (way cool!!!)
- Optimizer and buffer cache improvements
- Derived tables (how did I missed them when coming from Oracle)
- New INTL interface"
Frank:
"not to forget nbak"
Zaher:
"- EXECUTE BLOCK, it is like on the fly procedure
- Default paremeters in stored procedures"
Simon Carter:
"EXECUTE BLOCK
Get/Set Context - Because it paves the way for easily adding new built in
functions in future releases :-)
IIF
SUBSTRING enhancements
NEXT VALUE FOR
User can modify own passwords
Extending CREATE OR ALTER syntax to more objects."

..::firebird::..