Now that Borland has swallowed Ashton-Tate, SQL database vendors would be well advised to know that Borland has them in its sight. In a speech made recently Philippe Kahn, chairman, president, and CEO of Borland, indicated that the company’s strategy in the wake of the Ashton-Tate acquisition is Windows on the front end, an object layer in the middle, and Interbase on the back end. Interbase, which had been a wholly owned subsidiary of Ashton-Tate was the main reason Borland acquired the company. While Kahn said that Borland also coveted Ashton-Tate’s strong international presence, the fact is that about 800 employees of Ashton-Tate are now out of work, whereas Interbase staff have been made to feel very welcome and have even been promised their own campus-style facility. The point is that Interbase had attributes Borland wanted: a strong Unix presence, a healthy business with the federal government, and the ability to manage complex processing problems on-line. Kahn also says that Interbase’s support for Binary Large Objects, or BLOBs, lets you stuff just about anything that you can digitize into a database field. In the multimedia age this gives it an advantage over databases designed to handle alphanumeric data.
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