Interbase

Interbase

Interbase was created by Groton Database Systems in 1984 and funded by Apollo Computer. In 1986 Apollo decided to exit software business and gradually sold Interbase to Ashton-Tate from 1986 and 1991. Borland acquired Ashton-Tate in 1991 and got Interbase as part of the deal. Borland wanted to form a new company dedicated to Interbase and release the database as open-source, however, agreement on separation terms of the companies was not reached. Interbase 6 became an open-source product (out of which Firebird was forked) and Borland continued work on proprietary Interbase code.

Interbase today is a mature product, but never quite reached the top. Its strength is MVCC (multi-version concurrency control), which keeps separate copies of data for each transaction, thus avoiding locking while in use. However, that makes database grow very quickly, so database must be swept periodically. During that operation, every row in every table in the database is visited and obsolete copies of its data are deleted.

It’s very easy to maintain Interbase - and it has a very small footprint. Its full installation (server and client) is less than some other databases’ client-only part.

Interbase server will refuse to work with old database files, so if you are upgrading database server, you will need to back up your database in old server, then restore once you upgrade the server.

Full Convert supports Interbase database directly. Interbase is also known as Borland Interbase, Embarcadero Interbase (related files: ib, gdb).

Interbase data types we support

Integral

bigint (int64, quad), integer (long), smallint (short)

Decimal

decimal (numeric), double precision (double, real), float

Text

blob sub_type 1, char (character, text), nchar (national char, national character), nvarchar (national char varying, national character varying, nchar varying), varchar (char varying, character varying, varying)

Date/Time

date, time, timestamp

Large objects

blob sub_type 0 (blob), blob sub_type 1

Other

boolean (bool)

Export Interbase database

It may make sense to migrate your data away from Interbase. You may want to do it permanently or just need to share your tables with a collague in a different format.

We will copy all your tables with their data and apply indexing and relationships exactly as they are in your current Interbase database. In a nutshell, you get exactly the same database in another database engine. Each time you run the migration, we will copy all the tables again. Of course, we have a built-in scheduler, so you can run this overnight and have a fresh database copy in the morning.

Take a look at the quick tutorials below to see how it's done.

Import data into Interbase database

Additionally, if you want to import data on a regular basis and do not want to recreate the whole target database from scratch every time, but rather do tiny targeted sync of only changes since the last run, please use Full Convert Pro or Ultimate.

Take a look at the quick tutorials below to see how it's done.