I'm pleased to annouce that the first beta version of libgda/libgnomedb (version 2.99.2) have been released.

libgda/libgnomedb are a complete framewok for developing database-oriented applications, and actually allow access to PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, SQLite, FireBird/Interbase, IBM DB2, mSQL and MS SQL server, as well as MS Access and xBase files and ODBC data sources.

libgda/libgnomedb are part of the GNOME Office application suite, providing database access for many features in both Gnumeric and Abiword.

Changes from version 1.99.1 include:

LIBGDA:
- Make all the providers compile again (Vivien)
- C# bindings corrections (Daniel)
- MySQL provider fixes (Vivien, Stian)
- API renaming to avoid using the G namespace (Murray)
- Code cleanups (Murray)
- Change version to 2.99.x to become 3.0.x when the API/ABI is
declared stable (Murray)
- Lots of corrections and small improvements (Stian, Vivien)
- Make connections keep track of the current transaction status (Vivien)
- Doc. improvements (Vivien)
- 64 bits corrections (Bas)
- Improved code to make bindings easier (Murray)
- Translations:
- new Arabic transtation (Djihed Afifi)
- it (Marco Ciampa)

LIBGNOMEDB:
- C# bindings corrections (Daniel)
- Change version to 2.99.x to become 3.0.x when the API/ABI is
declared stable (Murray)
- Lots of corrections and small improvements (Stian, Vivien)
- Doc. improvements (Vivien)
- Glade3 support (Daniel)
- Code cleanups (Vivien)
- Improved code to make bindings easier (Murray)
- Improved sample application (Vivien)
- New plugin to display pictures from BLOB or encoded strings (Vivien)
- Translations:
- new Arabic transtation (Djihed Afifi)
- fi (Ilkka)
- en_GB (David Lodge)
- es (Francisco Javier)
- en_CA (Adam Weinberger)

Tarballs are available (or should soon be) at
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libgda/2.99/ and
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/libgnomedb/2.99/

To install this new version, you'll need:
* libgda: glib, libxml2, libxslt
* libgnomedb: libgda and dependencies, Gtk+ gt;= 2.6.0, libgnomeui,
libglade, gtksourceview

You can find more information at the projects' homepage
(http://www.gnome-db.org), or you can ask
any question/propose anything you
want in the GNOME-DB mailing list, which is available at
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-db-list.