Features in IB 4.X.
Interbase 4 has been the de facto version for many years, even after IB5.0 was released, in part because:
- IB5.X doesn't support the same number of platforms.
- My personal experience is that IB4.X is much more stable than IB5.0 that needed to release some minor versions (5.X) to reach a steady state.
- Is the version where we saw a porting to other platform outside ISC: to Free [UNIX] BSD made by Rios Corporation from Japan (see my useful links page),
- Is the version that ISC released for free in Linux as a way to promote IB.
- It was bundled (IB4.2) with Delphi 3 (regarded as the most stable Delphi version) and Delphi 3 is still actively used in year 2000, so probably IB is used as a development engine, even if it's not used as a production engine.
- Was the first 32-bit version (LIBS4.1 with Delphi 2) for Windows platforms. Regardless of your feelings about Windows, having IB on it was important for both developers and IB itself: the "real" db engines ran on several UNIX flavors but not on Windows 3.1, because it was not reliable as a server platform and didn't have the power to act as a server, too. Microsoft commissioned Sybase to write the first version of MsSqlServer but it ran only on Windows NT. In contrast, IB4.2 (32-bit) ran on Windows95 as well and there was IB4.0 (16-bit ) for Windows 3.1, making it ideal for developments. Probably still in 1999, the largest number of IB installations were on 32-bit Windows compared to other platforms.
- Was the first version to "fork" the original code so it was able to run as both a set of intercommunicated processes or a set of threads in one single process, depending on conditional compilation directives. The first minor version that exercised the threaded architecture was IB4.2 on Windows95/NT and the typical version bundled with Delphi 3 was WI-V4.2.1.328.
- Unfortunately, it was the first version to remove QLI from the package, because ISC wanted to give strong support to SQL as the language to interact with IB. The utility was shipped anyway with platforms other than Windows.
Interbase 4 already exhibited several abilities that are common to the newer versions. This is the preliminary list of features:
The list may be increased as some minor features are included, but for now is all I can offer as a general view of Interbase's capabilities.