FrontBase Documentation

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Welcome!
6. Original Documentation
Updated: 20-Nov-2000
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Table of Contents

6.1. Brief Introduction to FrontBase

FrontBase is a high performance relational database engine conforming to the standards and demands of today's quality minded developers and users.

The engine is written in pure ANSI C and benefits from 15+ years of experience with compiler and run-time systems, embedded systems, object-oriented programming, database systems, and command-and-control systems.

Supported platforms

OPENSTEP 4.2
Mac OS X Server
Windows NT
Solaris YellowDog Linux (PPC)
RedHat 5.1 Linux (Intel)
SuSE 6.2 Linux (Intel)

Other platforms will follow in 1999

Designed with forethought

FrontBase provides high performance and conformance to both international and de facto standards such as:
SQL 92: FrontBase is the first industrial strength database engine in compliance with this important international standard. This includes full integrity constraint checking built right into the engine.

Unicode: FrontBase uses Unicode 2.0 exclusively for handling all CHARACTER data, while conserving space by using the UTF-8 standard for representation. This provides easy support for mixed client environments and their varying character sets.

Communication: FrontBase uses sockets for communicating with clients, making it easy for developers to support a wide variety of client platforms (MacOS, Windows 95/NT, Rhapsody).

Administration: FrontBase databases can be administrated from any computer on the internet - a normal Web browser is all that is needed.

Specifications

The underlying truly relational oriented engine provides a solid foundation for dealing with databases very efficiently and without limitations:

Stringent transaction control

100% resiliency against crashes

Super-fast start-up times

Tera-byte size databases

Giga-byte size CHARACTER / VARCHAR strings and BLOBs

Multi-column optimized B-tree indexing with very low overhead

Host OS filesystem independency

In-memory caching of tables

Serializable isolation level with versioned reads

Row-level locking facilities

Read-only databases

If you have feedback or questions on this document, please send e-mail to doc-feedback@frontbase.com. Please reference the section number and topic. Thanks!!