Features in IB 5.X.
Interbase 5 was released in December of 1997, some months after Borland had created a wholly owned subsidiary, ISC (InterBase Software Corporation) to be in charge of InterBase, InterClient and Dbase. This was reflected in the fact that the default installation directory was "Interbase Corp", same as for the registry location for Windows installations. In the first months of 1998, IB5.0 was included in the BCB3 distribution.
IB5.X had an hazardous life. When v5.0 was released, it was a carnival of small bugs. Short after that, v5.1.1 was released as a fix for the most important problems. However, some complex SQL commands (the "distinct" clause intermixed with restrictions in the query, for example) never produced the expected results. One non-fatal message on really complex sentences involving views and joins was "no current record to fetch". When v5.5 was released, it implemented a few extra minor internal features and patches, but it introduced the infamous "sweeping bug". This bug manifests itself when a data model includes a foreign key that allows for NULL. When the engine is doing garbage collection, due to a problem in the order the internal sweeping operations are achieved, it can hit a dangling pointer while chasing and cleaning the old versions of a record and after that, corruption happens. Being Borland mainly a wintel company, IB5.5 on Windows had the problem since it was the first v5.5 produced; but when IB on other platforms was taken to v5.5, it was fixed. The solution was IB5.6, the first commercial free upgrade on Windows platforms for any client having a v5.X license. Finally, IB5.6 was much more stable than its predecessors and also it fulfilled the complex SQL requests where its predecessors failed or produced incorrect results. Also, some users have found it to be faster than IB5.1. But since Murphy never sleeps, both IB5.5 and IB5.6 delivered a broken client library that causes memory access errors when using events, so the solution was to use still the IB5.1 client library. Overall, IB5.X is slower than IB4.X in non-scientific measures. You also have to remember that the new ODS introduced more rules and conditions to check and more automatic functionality to execute.
This is the preliminary list of features:
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New On-Disk Structure (ODS) |
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Cascade declarative referential integrity |
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Changed UDF functionality |
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New UDF library |
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Index garbage collection |
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International character sets |
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New security check for reference privileges |
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Granting group privileges and SQL roles |
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The attachment governor |
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Gbak improvements and multi-file backup (gsplit) |
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New temporary file management |
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Cache configuration |
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New user management API calls |
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*Query optimization |
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Windows ISQL interface enhancements |
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Performance monitoring |
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New error codes |
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New keywords. |
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The configuration file |
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Proper daemon in UNIX. |
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Changes to gpre. |
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Changes in the license scheme. |
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Unsupported, deprecated and obsolete features. |
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Interclient and interserver |
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ODBC drivers. |
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The IB Guardian. |
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.