InterBase is a

relational database management system A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

(RDBMS) currently developed and marketed by

Embarcadero Technologies Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. is a U.S.-based computer software company that develops, manufactures, licenses and supports products and services related to software through several product divisions. It was founded in 1993, went public in 2000 ...

. It runs on the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Solaris Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

, Android, and

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

Technology

InterBase is a

SQL-92 SQL-92 (also called SQL 2) was the third revision of the SQL database query language. Unlike SQL-89, it was a major revision of the standard. Aside from a few minor incompatibilities, the SQL-89 standard is forward-compatible with SQL-92. The ...

-compliant

relational database A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

and supports standard interfaces such as

JDBC Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the Java (programming language), Java programming language which defines how a client may access a database. It is a Java-based data access technology used for Java ...

ODBC In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. An ...

, and ADO.NET.

History

Multiversion concurrency control before InterBase

Multiversion concurrency control Multiversion concurrency control (MCC or MVCC), is a non-locking concurrency control method commonly used by database management systems to provide concurrent access to the database and in programming languages to implement transactional memory. ...

is described in some detail in sections 4.3 and 5.5 of the 1981 paper "Concurrency Control in Distributed Database Systems" by Philip Bernstein and Nathan Goodman while employed by the Computer Corporation of America. Bernstein and Goodman's paper cites a 1978 dissertation by D.P. Reed, which describes MVCC and claims it as an original work.

Early years

Jim Starkey Jim Starkey (born January 6, 1949, in Illinois) is a database architect responsible for developing InterBase, the first relational database to support multi-versioning,Babcock, Charles"MySQL Database to Get Replication Monitoring, Multiversionin ...

was working at DEC on their DATATRIEVE 4th generation language

4GL A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is a high-level computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language g ...

product when he came up with an idea for a system to manage concurrent changes by many users. The idea simplified the existing problems of ''locking'' which were proving to be a serious problem for the new

systems being developed at the time. Although InterBase's implementation is much more similar to the system described by Reed in his MIT dissertation than any other database that existed at the time and Starkey knew Bernstein from his previous position at the Computer Corporation of America and later at DEC, Starkey claims that he arrived at the idea of multiversion concurrency control independently. According to his blog, Starkey says:

The inspiration for multi-generational concurrency control was a database system done by
Prime A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...
that supported page level snapshots. The intention of the feature was to give a reader a
consistent In deductive logic, a consistent theory is one that does not lead to a logical contradiction. A theory T is consistent if there is no formula \varphi such that both \varphi and its negation \lnot\varphi are elements of the set of consequences ...
view of the database without blocking writers. The idea intrigued me as a very useful characteristic of a database system.

Open source

In early 2000,

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. B ...

announced that InterBase would be released under

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

, and began negotiations to spin off a separate company to manage the product. The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

for InterBase version 6 was released under a variant of the

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of bo ...

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. In 2001, a backdoor was discovered in the software that had been present in all versions since 1994 and then resolved.

CodeGear

On May 7, 2008, Borland and

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.

Recent releases

References

External links

InterBase product page

{{Authority control Client-server database management systems CodeGear software Cross-platform software MacOS database-related software Proprietary database management systems Relational database management software for Linux Windows database-related software