Interbase

Interbase was created by Groton Database Systems in 1984 and funded by Apollo Computer. In 1986 Apollo decided to exit software business and gradually sold Interbase to Ashton-Tate from 1986 and 1991. Borland acquired Ashton-Tate in 1991 and got Interbase as part of the deal. Borland wanted to form a new company dedicated to Interbase and release the database as open-source, however, agreement on separation terms of the companies was not reached. Interbase 6 became an open-source product (out of which Firebird was forked) and Borland continued work on proprietary Interbase code.

We support Interbase directly in our products! You don't need separate drivers and can immediately connect to your database.

Interbase today is a mature product, but never quite reached the top. Its strength is MVCC (multi-version concurrency control), which keeps separate copies of data for each transaction, thus avoiding locking while in use. However, that makes database grow very quickly, so database must be swept periodically. During that operation, every row in every table in the database is visited and obsolete copies of its data are deleted.

It’s very easy to maintain Interbase - and it has a very small small footprint. Its full installation (server and client) is less than some other databases’ client-only part.

Interbase server will refuse to work with old database files, so if you are upgrading database server, you will need to back up your database in old server, then restore once you upgrade the server.

Interbase

data types we support

Integral
bigint (int64, quad)
integer (long)
smallint (short)
decimal
decimal (numeric)
double precision (double, real)
float
text
blob sub_type 1
char (character, text)
nchar (national char, national character)
nvarchar (national char varying, national character varying, nchar varying)
varchar (char varying, character varying, varying)
Binary
byte
byte var
Date/Time
date
time
timestamp
Large objects
blob sub_type 0 (blob)
blob sub_type 1
Other
boolean (bool)