Embarcadero InterBase is a full-featured, high-performance, encryptable, multiplatform and scalable relational database for developers who are looking to embed a low-cost, zero admin, lightweight, secure database into their cross-platform connected applications. With InterBase, you get powerful access control, data change management, disaster recovery and journaling, and support for popular database drivers for increased deployment flexibility.
- Secure: InterBase provides over-the-wire and at-rest encryption, separate security login, and role-based user security.
- Lightweight: InterBase is one of the fastest native databases available, with a small, lightweight footprint.
- Resilient: Interbase supports effective disaster recovery planning through live backups, incremental dumps, multithreaded restore, write-ahead logging, and point-in-time recovery.
- Efficient: InterBase’s Change Views feature reduces development time, network costs, and server CPU demand.
- Self-Reliant: InterBase will just run and run and run! Even with the hardest working databases processing 10,000+ transactions each second.
- Flexible: Multi-Platform Support. Runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.
- SQL Compliant: InterBase is an SQL standards-compliant database. InterBase strictly follows SQL industry standards
About
About Interbase
Everything a SQL Database should be
Secure
Attacks on databases and data loss can be costly and lead to loss of customers’ trust (and business), regulatory action, and heavy fines. InterBase provides over-the-wire and at-rest encryption, separate security login, and role-based user security. InterBase maintains full on-disk encryption while adding negligible overhead to database speed and performance.
- Cross-Platform Encryption. InterBase supports encryption over the wire between the server and clients and data at rest (DES and AES 256-bit encryption). InterBase encryption is built in as part of its cross-platform single file format.
- Separate Security Login. Data visibility is defined by a specialist login to the database (SYSDSO) with a column-level granularity that ensures even developers cannot bypass encryption to view and search for sensitive data.
- Reduced Risk. Built-in granular column-level encryption drastically reduces the risk of data breaches through requirement changes and product refactoring as your data layer (and not your application) manages data visibility.
- Role-Based User Security. Define user security roles that align with job roles (Accountant, Accounts Manager, Sales, HR, etc.) to easily add or remove access to data and change tracking across your system.
- Encrypted Backups. InterBase also supports a backup-specific encryption key that allows an encrypted backup to be created and answers the needs of those requiring command-line backups to be run via scheduling.
Lightweight
InterBase is one of the fastest native databases available, with a small, lightweight footprint. InterBase leverages today’s multicore CPUs and multi-CPU systems, combined with a unique versioning approach and advanced disk I/O caching, to retrieve and update your data blazingly fast.
- Small footprint. In its smallest distribution, InterBase is only a few megabytes. The small on-disk footprint and in-memory requirements make it ideal for any device requiring a commercial-grade embeddable database engine.
- Fast Install. InterBase server installs completely in seconds with an embeddable installer to allow for silent installation of server and client drivers. When it comes to InterBase ToGo, no installation is required! Just deploy the InterBase libraries along with your application.
- Faster Data. InterBase’s Change Views improve data speed and scalability by dramatically reducing the amount of data moved and lowering data costs, network traffic, server CPU demand, and disk I/O.
- Write-Ahead Logging. Journaling provides the security of immediately writing changes to disk with the benefits of a full in-memory database system. Enable journaling through a single line of SQL without any changes in your application.
Resilient
Your app and business run on data, making database disaster recovery a critical feature. Interbase supports effective disaster recovery planning through live backups, incremental dumps, multithreaded restore, write-ahead logging, and point-in-time recovery. The database can be backed up via the command line, our admin tools, via code using the backup APIs, or the ODBC driver GUI.
- Live Backups. InterBase’s multi-versioning architecture enables backup snapshots while users are still connected and changing the database.
- Distinguished Data Dumps. Distinguished data dumps quickly create a read-only copy of your database. In a DR scenario, switching the database to read/write is faster than waiting for a restore. First-time setups create a complete copy of the database, while subsequent runs update the copy with only the changes to the primary database.
- Fast Restores. InterBase restores using multiple threads on multiple processors to ensure the fastest possible recovery of the database and indexes.
- Write-Ahead Logging. InterBase’s journaling provides the security of immediately writing changes to disk, with the benefits of a full in-memory database system. Enable journaling with a single line of SQL.
- Point-in-Time Recovery. Quickly revert the database to any second in time using journal archives. Journal archives can be stored off the device to provide a fast recovery even if the backup hasn’t run.
Efficient
InterBase’s Change Views feature reduces development time, network costs, and server CPU demand associated with other replication methods that rely on traditional change-tracking methods. As a result, development teams benefit from cost savings, time savings, and improved user experience.
- Log-less replication. InterBase’s Change Views eliminate common scalability issues associated with log tables and time-stamp fields.
- Secure Data Change Subscriptions. Once a device is granted rights and subscribed to specific tables or columns of data, it tracks what is changing at the field level for that subscription. This simple model enables access to data changes to be securely managed and easily scaled out with less code to develop, refactor, build, and test.
- The Most Secure Change Tracking Available. Change Views not only makes it easy to identify what has changed, but it also controls who can track those changes and prevents others from even guessing at data changes.
- Easily Fetch Data Deltas. Change Views provides just the field-level deltas of what has changed, allowing developers to give detailed analysis back to the end user while lowering data-movement costs. Change Views data can be queried via SQL before syncing to ensure you never end up with a surprise data bill.
SQL Compliant
InterBase is an SQL standards-compliant database. InterBase strictly follows SQL industry standards. It supports Unicode and is ideal for any character set globally. It offers multiple-join Unicode, real-time event alerts and our patent-pending Change Views’ SQL-based change tracking.
- Change Views. Change Views speeds up applications and lowers network traffic and costs by identifying and fetching only the changes made to the database. Read the Change Views white paper.
- Multigenerational Architecture. Connects with consistent database snapshots, ensures readers don’t block writers from making changes and increases scalability.
- Event Alerts. InterBase Events enable a real-time alert to connected clients when a change is committed. This saves on CPU-intensive database polling and increases database scalability.
- Customizable. Easily customize InterBase with custom field types, stored procedures, custom exceptions and triggers. Customization helps automate database logic, data transformation and easy maintenance.
- Generators. Generators allow you to fetch sequential numbers that are typically used for primary keys. InterBase will not assign duplicate keys. Generators enable InterBase to produce key values centrally in the database.
News
What’s new in InterBase 2020?
InterBase is a powerful, zero-administration, small-footprint database engine that can power your server and even run on your mobile devices as an embedded database. The InterBase 2020 release adds a number of new features, including tablespaces support for InterBase, allowing for better performance on servers with multiple data-storage options.
Tablespace
InterBase multifile database may be interpreted as occupying a single primary tablespace. This tablespace presents a single logical collection of database pages numbered by their sequence in this collection. Starting with InterBase 2020, users can define other named tablespaces that present independent logical collections of pages. For more information, refer to Tablespace
ALTER DESCRIPTION Support
InterBase users prior to InterBase 2020 would execute a “UPDATE SET RDB$DESCRIPTION= WHERE =”, for each entity type. This requires the user to know the database system schema in detail for each entity type. The new DDL syntax takes away this complexity and provides a new “ALTER DESCRIPTION FOR” syntax that is standard across all database entities supported by InterBase.
TMP$INDICES table
InterBase 2020 introduces “TMP$INDICES” a new system table included as part of the Performance Monitoring system tables. This table tracks all loaded indices per table in the database with key metrics for monitoring.
IBConsole
InterBase 2020 introduces the following enhancements to the IBConsole tool:
- Performance Monitor
- A new Indices tab that shows a table with details about indices.
- Interactive SQL Window
- Closing the Interactive SQL Window on a read-only transaction no longer prompts a commit or rollback dialogue, the transaction is committed, and the window closes.
- Enhanced support for the RECONNECT clause. It now supports CACHE, lc_ctype and DIALECT.
- A new Show tab, this tab shows information from isql SHOW statements
- InterBase 2020 features support (Tablespaces, Alter Description DDL)
- Change Views subscription context and colouring of change status
- Syntax highlighting of queries
- 64-bit IBConsole.exe binary with 64-bit Edition of InterBase
- Server-wide Performance Monitoring enhancements
- WISQL SHOW commands
System
System requirements
InterBase Developer Edition and Server Edition
Supported operating systems:
Windows (64-bit and 32-bit)
- Windows 10
- Windows 8, 8.1
- Windows 7
- Windows Vista
- Windows Server 2019
- Windows Server 2016
- Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2
- Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2
Linux (64-bit and 32-bit)
- RHEL 7
- RHEL 6
- SuSE 11.3
- Ubuntu 14
- Ubuntu 16
macOS (64-bit and 32-bit)
- High Sierra (10.13)
- Sierra (10.12)
- El Capitan (10.11)
Solaris
- InterBase XE is the latest release.
Supported processor architecture
Windows, Linux, and macOS
- Intel x86 or Intel x86-64
Solaris
- SPARC
Hard disk space
- Installation files: ~250MB (~350MB for the Japanese version)
- Space needed for install
- ~46 MB for Client Only installation.
- ~117 MB for Server and Client installation.
InterBase ToGo Edition
Supported operating systems
Windows (64-bit and 32-bit)
- Windows 10
- Windows 8, 8.1
- Windows 7
- Windows Vista
- Windows Server 2016
- Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2
- Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2
Linux (64-bit and 32-bit)
- RHEL 7
- RHEL 6
- SuSE 11.3
- Ubuntu 14
- Ubuntu 16
macOS
- High Sierra (10.13)
- Sierra (10.12)
- El Capitan (10.11)
Android
- Nougat (7.x)
- Marshmallow (6.x)
- Lollipop (5.x)
- Android (4.x)
iOS
- iOS 10
- iOS 9
- iOS 8
- iOS 7
SERVER/CLIENT COMPATIBILITY
InterBase 2020 server is certified to work with a compatible InterBase 2020 client. Since there are no breaking API changes, earlier versions of InterBase clients may also work with the current version of the server.
Licensing
License Options
Interbase 2020 is offered in four editions to cover all needs; IBLite, ToGo Edition, Desktop Edition and Server Edition.
Server Edition
InterBase Server Edition is a cost-effective, zero administration, lightweight, but powerful, embeddable database for your business-critical applications. As your organization grows, InterBase Server scales with you. InterBase Server allows hundreds of simultaneous users to connect to a single database. You can start with 8 CPUs/cores and a single user but can add up to 32 cores and unlimited users. In addition to providing local RDBMS capabilities, the server edition allows remote connections for increased flexibility. InterBase server provides AES data encryption and SSL communication for more security and access control. Perfect for Enterprises, ISVs, OEMs and VARs who need to embed a database into their applications.
Supported platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris
ToGo Edition
InterBase ToGo Edition is a full-featured embeddable database that runs in a stand-alone environment but allows deployment of applications which directly utilize the InterBase engine DLLs. With no separate database server process running, the database engine executes in the application process space providing an extremely small footprint. Together with other key features such as high security, zero administration and simple installation, InterBase XE3 ToGo is an incredible solution for VARs, OEMs and ISVs.
Supported platforms: Windows, Mac OS X
Desktop Edition
InterBase Desktop Edition provides you with a great embeddable solution for stand-alone single-user applications. Desktop Edition offers SQL RDBMS capabilities for local connection from multiple applications and scales to 4 CPUs/Cores while providing you with all the InterBase features, including a small operational footprint, AES data encryption for more security, high availability and performance, and zero administration. Perfect for small to mid-size ISVs, OEMs and VARs who need to embed a database into their applications.
Supported platforms: Windows
IBLite Edition
Do you want a zero-admin, ACID-compliant, lightweight and fast database that is run-time-royalty free? Would you like the flexibility to supercharge the database even after deployment with powerful extras, such as encryption and additional disk space? Ideal for free applications and those applications that want to offer encryption as an extra, IBLite is a binary-compatible version of InterBase ToGo that can easily be upgraded by simply changing the license file! IBLite is available with Delphi and C++Builder (Professional with Mobile and above), RAD Studio (all editions) and Appmethod.
See the InterBase Feature Matrix for a more detailed comparison.
Support
Support
It is possible to buy support and maintenance with all Embarcadero products. Embarcadero support and help can be found at the following links:
Alfsoft provides technical first-line support to all Embarcadero customers. Please describe your problem as detailed as possible when contacting our support. Remember to always inform about your product version and your operating system (both platform and version). You find instructions for support here (https://www.alfasoft.com/en/support.html).
Click here to visit our Help centre & Knowledgebase
Recommended resources and links
- InterBase FAQ
- InterBase Change View (PDF)
- InterBase Change Views (YouTube)