The primary goals for Firebird 3.0 were to unify the server architecture and to improve support for SMP and multiple-core hardware platforms. Parallel objectives were to improve threading of engine processes and the options for sharing page cache across thread and connection boundaries.

Alongside these aims came new strategies to improve performance, query optimization, monitoring and scalability and to address the demand for more security options. A number of popular features were introduced into the SQL language, including the long-awaited support for the Boolean data type and the associated logical predications.