InterBase is a relational database management system (RDBMS) currently developed and marketed by Embarcadero Technologies. InterBase is distinguished from other RDBMSs by its small footprint, close to zero administration requirements, and multi-generational architecture.
We have a huge legacy ERP system, where some parts are running on Firebird, and some are running on our main InterBase database.
The solution's disaster recovery capability is very nice because we have these just-in-time dumps. We have some jobs on our servers, and they do a dump every five minutes. If the database crashes, you will have a maximum data loss of around four minutes, which is fine.
It would be nice if InterBase had an update or insert statements feature. The solution integrated another feature two years ago, where you could select statements from select statements. The database handles the second select statement as its own table, but it was also not stable. Under some conditions, the database also crashed. For InterBase, we want Embarcadero to build a stable product. We want no new features, just stable software.
I have been using InterBase for 20 to 25 years.
I rate the solution a five out of ten for stability.
InterBase is not a very scalable solution for us. You can split the database, but it won't work very well if you have some relation between the tables. If you have a database with ten tables, you can cut it in half and have two parts of the database with five tables each. If the table is related to the other five, it won't work properly. So, the solution is not very scalable by itself. A few hundred people are using the solution in our organization.
I rate the solution a four out of ten for scalability.
The solution's technical support is nice. Since we're a premium partner of Embarcadero, we pay for the support, which is okay. If you cannot give them a step-by-step problem to reproduce, they often say they can't fix it. Hence, the technical support is not the very best.
If you look from the outside of Embarcadero, which developed InterBase, it seems like they don't know their product. Sometimes, the developers know the product better than they do. It seems like they aren't understanding how their own product works.
Neutral
Firebird is an open-source solution, and it's free of cost. Firebird has a few more functions for your queries. They have some native functions for different kinds of things, which InterBase does not have. Firebird has the update or insert statements. In InterBase, you have to check whether the data set is already there and then update or insert if the record is not there yet.
The solution's developer is Embarcadero Technologies, but they are not doing a good job. We had a lot of problems in the last few years with database crashes, and they couldn't reproduce it. The database is a little bit more stable today. It seems like the database was developed at night and deployed to many companies and people. Sometimes, it seems rare.
Three database administrators are needed for the administration and maintenance of InterBase. You can encrypt the whole database, but it slows down the performance.
We used the solution's change synchronization feature three years ago, but it also crashed a lot. If you were notified about a change, sometimes the database hangs up. It wasn't working anymore. They said they would fix it, but we chose to do it ourselves. We no longer trust these features because it costs us hundreds and thousands of dollars if our database is broken for some hours.
It was easy to integrate InterBase with other products and third-party solutions. For developing software, that's one thing. If you want to use an ORM (Object Relational Mapping), many software supports Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and My SQL but do not support InterBase. So, that's a problem. I would not recommend the solution to other users.
Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.
