Small footprint.
Probably, the first time you noticed Interbase was in a Delphi CD-ROM. If not, perhaps you knew and used the product since several years ago. In the CD-ROM, IB setup takes up only a small space. On my system, after installed, it takes up 13 MB. Ironically, full documentation takes up nearly 20 MB.So your first impression may be that small footprint on both disk and RAM means a toy server and not one you would agree to write your applications for nor to sell to your clients as a part of your application. Also, a deployment kit plus a license is going to cost you less than 200 dollars. You may be really thinking this IB is only a demo product or one aimed to your practices in C/S development.
Let's try to destroy some myths: if you have worked on UNIX or LINUX, you have noticed several useful utilities are little but powerful. In Windows, non-GUI products that take command line arguments are tiny, too. The misconception that needs clearing is the one that you are used on Microsoft products, including the operating system itself: you were taught to think that great products that look nicely and work well or at least acceptable must be very expensive. You learned by force of the repetition that a program must be huge to be great. The problem is almost any GUI imposes an overhead when cracking the event oriented graphical interface and the drawing of visual appealing objects in the screen. Also, for these complex tasks, you use a framework that adds its own overhead to the executable, be it the Delphi's VCL, the Eiffel's WEL or the library extensions to deal with graphical desktops in the UNIX world. Also, keep in mind you pay megabucks for Microsoft products and they still are buggy, so high price doesn't guarantee high quality. And if you purchase Oracle, it may be one of the most streamlined and optimized database servers in the world, but you'll need huge disk capacity, complicated setup, dedicated administration, plenty of RAM space and a good processor. I know there's a thing called Personal Oracle but I will return briefly to the "personal" engines on another page.
No, showing how bad all the other products may be is not my business, but you need to have some food for thought, even in the case you strongly disagree with me. As I wrote in the list of features, I don't want to sell you the product for your life, because for each task, there's a product that best serves your needs and best adjusts to your budget.
Indeed, when IB claims to have a little footprint, this means several things:
 |
It won't bloat your hard disk |
|
It won't eat all your RAM and cry for more except if you are using really expensive operations on large tables... and there's a way to limit the available memory to the server. |
|
It won't require that you have a first-class CPU; even a modest old 486 will do the trick if the requirements for your environment aren't heavy. |
|
It won't require you to take a course of DBA for 8 months and in under normal operation, it requires little administration. In fact, many small sites run IB without a person in charge of it. |
|
It won't require to call an expert to install the product. Simply follow the read-me documents and the basic manuals and you should be running in minutes, not weeks. |
|
As I wrote above, it won't eat all your budget only to purchase the server and the price of each additional license is affordable, even in my country. And IB vendors or VARs aren't going to inspect your HW to charge you additional feeds for the CPU's MHz or because you have a multiprocessor machine. |
|
Although it never was advertised, you rarely need to call for IB support. There's a strong dedicated community to the product, so almost any question is answered there, free of charge. |
That's said, in my computer, IB itself uses 1.5 MB on disk and 400 KB on RAM when it's started. When I do the first connection to the server, its memory utilization raises to 1 MB and after connecting to a db and perusing several tables, memory consumption is about 3 MB. Of course, when I start doing ordering, complicated joins and so on, memory utilizations grows, but in a conscious way.
One of the reasons IB takes up little space on disk is because it has some tools that are command line and a basic GUI administration program. This may be seen as a huge disadvantage, but there're several good products, both shareware and freeware, available on Internet that are aimed specifically to IB and also you have a specialized CASE tool that unleashes all the IB power. The upcoming IB6 was aimed to provide a better graphical interface administration tool, at least in Windows to see how it goes.
However, as a final statement, because a product is lightweight, easy to install and manage, cheap and with few bell and whistles (like nice tools with songs included, for example), doesn't mean it's bad. If that premise was always true, Linux wouldn't exist. IB features come in handy when you are building your application and you can enjoy the flexibility, not when you open the box and look for a rebate advertisement or a coupon for 45 days of free Internet, like in other monster products. And if you think this product is only for very small companies, think twice: there're IB installations running in excess of 300 users and more than 200 GB. This is not my idea of a personal office or a very small company.