InterBase Performance Monitor

InterBase is a relational database management system (RDBMS) 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.

Technology

InterBase is a SQL-92-compliant relational database and supports standard interfaces such as JDBC, ODBC, and ADO.NET.

Small footprint

A full InterBase server installation requires around 40 MB on disk. A minimum InterBase client install requires about 400 KB of disk space.

Embedded or server

InterBase can be run as an embedded database or regular server.

Data controller friendly inbuilt encryption

Since InterBase XE, InterBase includes 256bit AES strength encryption that offers full database, table or column data encryption. This assists data controllers conform with data protection laws around at-rest data by providing separated encryption / db access to the database and ensuring the database file is encrypted wherever it resides. The separation of the encryption also enables developers to just develop the application rather than worry about the data visible from a specific user login.

Multi-generational architecture

Concurrency control

To avoid blocking during updates, Interbase uses multiversion concurrency control instead of ''locks''. Each transaction will create a version of the record. Upon the write step, the update will fail rather than be blocked initially.

Rollbacks and recovery

InterBase also uses multi-generational records to implement rollbacks rather than transaction logs.

Drawbacks

Certain operations are more difficult to implement in a multi-generational architecture, and hence perform slowly relative to a more traditional implementation. One example is the SQL COUNT verb. Even when an index is available on the column or columns included in the COUNT, all records must be visited in order to see if they are visible under the current transaction isolation.

History

Multiversion concurrency control before InterBase

Multiversion concurrency control 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—then employed by the Computer Corporation of America. Bernstein and Goodman's paper cites a 1978 dissertation by D.P. Reed which quite clearly describes MVCC and claims it as an original work.

Early years

Jim Starkey was working at DEC on their DATATRIEVE 4th generation language 4GL product when he came up with an idea for a system to manage concurrent changes by many users. The idea dramatically simplified the existing problems of ''locking'' which were proving to be a serious problem for the new relational database systems being developed at the time. Starkey, however, had the idea after he had spun off his original relational database project to another group and a turf war ensued. Starkey left the company after shipping the first version of the Rdb/ELN product.

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 has stated that he arrived at the idea of multiversion concurrency control independently. In the same comment, Starkey says:

The inspiration for multi-generational concurrency control was a database system done by Prime that supported page level snapshots. The intention of the feature was to give a reader a consistent view of the database without blocking writers. The idea intrigued me as a very useful characteristic of a database system.

He had heard that the local workstation vendor Apollo Computer was looking for a database offering on their Unix machines, and they agreed to fund development. With their encouragement he formed Groton Database Systems (named after the town, Groton, Massachusetts, where they were located) on Labor Day 1984 and started work on what would eventually be released as InterBase. In 1986 Apollo suffered a corporate shakeup and decided to exit the software business, but by this time the product was making money.

The road to Borland

Between 1986 and 1991 the product was gradually sold to Ashton-Tate, makers of the famous dBASE who were at the time purchasing various database companies in order to fill out their portfolio. The company was soon in trouble, and Borland purchased Ashton-Tate in 1991, acquiring InterBase as part of the deal.

Open source

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