InterBase is a relational database management system

1.

2. Review

• InterBase is a relational database management system currently
developed and marketed by Embarcadero Technologies. InterBase is
distinguished from other RDBMSs by its small footprint, close to
zero administration requirements, and multi-generational
architecture. InterBase runs on the Microsoft Windows, macOS,
Linux, Solaris operating systems as well as iOS and Android.

3. History

• InterBase was originally conceived and created by a group of former
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employees out of a desire to
produce an innovative RDBMS that offered substantially greater
benefits than other existing databases.
• 1985 -IB began as Groton Database Systems & was shortly thereafter
renamed InterBase
• 1991 -IB was purchased by Aston Tate
• 1992 -IB was acquired by Borland as part of Borland's takeover of
Aston Tate
• 1997 -IB became a wholly owned subsidiary of Borland International

4. History

• In early 2000, Borland announced that InterBase would be released under
open source, and began negotiations to spin off a separate company to
manage the product. When the people who were to run the new company
and Borland could not agree on the terms of the separation, InterBase
remained a Borland product, and the source code for InterBase version 6
was released under a variant of the Mozilla Public License in mid-2000.
• With the InterBase division at Borland under new management, the
company released a proprietary version of InterBase version 6 and then
6.5. Borland released several updates to the open source code before
announcing that it would no longer actively develop the open source
project. Firebird, an open source fork of the InterBase 6 code, however,
remains in active development.

5. History

• On February 8 of 2006, Borland announced the intention to sell their
line of development tool products, including InterBase, Delphi,
JBuilder, and other tools, but instead of selling the divisions, Borland
spun them out as a subsidiary on 14 November 2006. InterBase,
along with IDE tools such as Delphi and JBuilder were included in the
new company's product lineup. Then on 7 May 2008, Borland and
Embarcadero Technologies announced that Embarcadero had "signed
a definitive asset purchase agreement to purchase CodeGear."The
acquisition, for approximately $24.5 million, closed on 30 June 2008.

6. History

• In September 2010, Embarcadero announced the availability of
InterBase XE. Its new features include a 64 bit client and server,
improved security, improved scalability, support for dynamic SQL in
stored procedures, and optimized performance of large objects with
stream methods.
• In 2013/2014 Embarcadero added iOS and then Android to the
available supported platforms in InterBase XE3. Additionally InterBase
IBLite was released - a run time royalty free edition of InterBase
covering Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.

7. History

• In December 2014, embarcadero released InterBase XE7 offering a
brand new, patent pending change tracking technology called
"Change Views.". Added Ubuntu to the certified Linux platforms and
also added 64bit Linux support. Additional 64bit transaction ID's were
introduced and new distinguished data dumps enabling rapid updates
of read only copies of the master database.
• In March 2017, Embarcadero released InterBase 2017. InterBase 2017
includes InterBase ToGo for Linux, Server wide monitoring support for
InterBase Server, a number of language enhancements (including
derived tables and common table expressions, truncate table for
faster data removal), enhancements to Change Views for expanding a
subscription with a table wide scope, new transaction isolation levels
and transaction wait time management.

8. Positions in the market

9. Positions in the market

10. Positions in the market

11. Perspectives

• Embarcadero added server-wide performance monitoring in
InterBase 2017 based on repeated requests from independent
software vendors (ISVs) to monitor multiple databases simultaneously
in self-managed hosted solutions. “A growing number of ISVs are
developing hosted solutions that make full use of the award winning
‘Change Views’ feature in InterBase. Server-wide performance
monitoring simplifies the management of multiple databases on the
same server,” said Stephen Ball, InterBase product manager at
Embarcadero.

12. Perspectives

• With an increasing number of databases shifting business models to the
cloud, many smaller ISVs are turning to InterBase as a low-cost, highfeatured alternative to ensure a continuation of on premises solutions in
the future. “We’ve seen a major increase in the demand for derived tables
and common table expressions (CTEs) in the last year as more and more
developers look at porting to InterBase,” added Ball.
• When referring to reduced workload for DBAs, Ball said, “Where some
complex data queries may have needed a DBA to create a selectable stored
procedure in the past, the flexibility achieved in offering the same output
via a CTE – that a developer can write into their query instead – is in
keeping with the InterBase mantra of zero admin that has made it the go to
database for medical, retail and highly distributed systems globally.”