Interbase Software Corp, Bedford, Massachusetts, which has had a beta test version of its Interbase relational database for the IBM RS/6000 out since October, is to begin shipping it from this month. Shown at the recent Database World exhibition in the US on major shareholder Ashton-Tate Corp’s stand, Interbase Version 3.0 for the RS/6000 is suitable for scientific as well as commercial applications, as it includes array support for large or small structured objects up to 16 dimensions to be stored in the database. Also available on Hewlett-Packard, Apollo, DEC, Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations and on machines running Santa Cruz Operation Unix, Interbase supports basic large objects – known as blobs – transaction processing, a multi-user architecture optimised for concurrent readers and writers and automatic two-phase commit and recovery. Version 3.0 also includes event alerters, blob filters and user-defined functions, as well as the array support. Multi-site reads and writes are supported among machines with different architectures, all in the same transaction, allowing users to query and update databases on a mixed machine network wherever the data resides. No prices were given. Interbase, a later starter in the battle for the database market, nevertheless claims over 7,000 licensees in industries such as aerospace, electronics, financial trading, manufacturing and process control, network management and government. The product is also marketed as Starbase by Cognos Inc.
