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Multi platform support.There was one date in the ancient times when IB was available for 18 platforms, but oddly, it never was advertised nor sold for those 18 platforms. If you got acquaintance with IB when you opened your Delphi box like me, you might be tempted to think IB is a Windows product and it's a tool put only in the box to facilitate your practice of C/S concepts or to justify the Delphi's price.After you read about small footprint as well as true C/S conformance and the two versions available, hope you can have an idea the product is not going to compete against the most famous and huge database products, but definitely is not a toy. And it's not only a product to let you program your C/S application: you can purchase licenses and the deployment kit and give your application to your customers. It would be a pity if you developed your application and took advantage of one of the aforementioned features built in IB and later you discover you have to waste time writing additional code to handle the same cases with other apparently more complete products. The constant here is that IB has a small footprint on Windows, Linux, Novell and several UNIX flavors. The limitation in Novell is that you can't have UDFs. Also, FreeUDFLib was ported to Linux and UNIX (as FreeUDFLibC) but there's nothing that impedes you to port it to other platforms (Novell exclueded) where IB is able to run. Interbase databases are binary compatible across Win32 versions and some people claim they are able to take them among other platforms and they still work. While this may be good news, the right think to do is taking a backup in transportable format and restoring it in the target computer. Even though this limitation doesn't apply on WinNT v/s Win9X, it's a good idea to use a backup and a restore so the database gets an optimization as an added value. Don't you think funny that a "toy" RDBMS had been ported to more operating systems that some expensive and huge products? If you want to see the current platform information, read it in the official website. If you want to read the platform availability for IB5.X, read it here from a document that existed in the official website until March 1999.
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This page was last updated on 2000-07-21 02:42:46 |