FrontBase Introduction


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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

Mac OS X Server Mac OS X Windows NT Solaris

YellowDog Linux (PPC) RedHat 5.1 Linux (Intel) SuSE 6.2 Linux (Intel and PowerPC) FreeBSD (Intel) Debian Linux Stormix Mandrake

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.

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

• 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