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What is InterBase?

InterBase is a cross-platform relation database server, which supports a variety of platforms including Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 98/ME, Linux and several Unix-based systems. InterBase has low system requirements, great performance and it is very easy-to-administrate! You can work with InterBase via TCP/IP, NetBEUI and IPX/SPX network protocols.

As the main InterBase feature and advantage in our opinion is multi-generation architecture. It enables InterBase users to work in the multi-user environment effectively, because writing transactions never locks reading transactions! This also allows avoiding of transaction log use. Another database systems use it to recover databases after corruption, but InterBase does not need it, multi-generation architecture is more stable.

It is important that the optimistic record locking mechanism is implemented in InterBase. This means that a server locks the only changed records but not the whole page. This feature greatly reduces conflict possibility in the multi-user environment.

InterBase is fully compatible with ANSI SQL 92 and also has its own enhancements of SQL for stored procedures and triggers. Unlike other RDBMS InterBase has a very efficient mechanism of triggers. A table can have a huge number of triggers. They fires automatically before or after insertion, updating and deletion of the every record. Many well-known features of modern database systems were initially implemented in InterBase. In particular, we can mention updatable views, event alerter mechanism, multi-dimension array-fields and BLOB-fields. Moreover, some InterBase features, such as two-phase commit, still are absolute unique!