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FrontBase™ 3.5 Adds Symbolic Time Zones, New Functions, Enhanced Control

Los Angeles, February 26, 2002: FrontBase, Inc. today announced that it would immediately begin shipping a new enhanced version of their best-in-class database software, FrontBase™ Relational Database Server 3.5.

A major new feature in 3.5 is the ability to work with symbolic time zones. FrontBase 3.5, in symphony with the client side tools and libraries, is now able to correctly deal with situations where client applications are "located" in different time zones than the server. This alleviates all time zone and Daylight Savings Time (DST) management from client applications. For example if the server is located in NY (time zone is -05:00), and a client in CA (time zone is -08:00) inserts the value ’2002-02-11 20:48:00’, a client in Denmark (time zone is +01:00) fetches the value and displays it correctly as ’2002-02-12 05:48:00’.

Two new functions are now supported: ABS and SIGN. ABS will return a positive value of the same datatype as the argument. Examples: ABS(-9), ABS(4.0), ABS(-8888.9999). SIGN will return an INTEGER value of -1 (if the argument is negative), 0 (if the argument is zero) and 1 (if the argument is positive).

The sql92 command line tool now includes commands for controlling and maintaining a replication master and its clients. The sql92 commands assume that you have a session to the master server, and the commands works on the corresponding replicator. The following commands have been added: START REPLICATOR; CREATE CLIENT <datbase-name>, ADD CLIENT <datbase-name>, REMOVE CLIENT <datbase-name>, SHOW CLIENTS, STOP REPLICATOR.

The release of the 3.5 Version marks another milestone in their path of innovation in database software. FrontBase 3.5 is shipping today on Mac OS X, Solaris and Redhat Linux, with the other supported platforms following shortly: Windows (2000/NT), Unix (FreeBSD), Linux (YellowDog, Debian, Mandrake Linux).

FrontBase Database Server was conceived in Denmark in early 1996 using design criteria borne of existing databases’ limitations, and the possibilities that could only be achieved with today’s technology, to answer the needs of the Internet age. The requirements of today are very different technically from the client server architecture of years past. The designers decided on ANSI C for cross platform purposes, using true Unicode in the core architecture for international character sets ensuring easy localization in the global marketplace, and the latest standard of SQL, SQL 92 on the 3rd level. The resulting product is technically incomparable with anything that was designed before the Internet age.

There is no finer example of innovation and technical superiority than FrontBase’s "Instant Versioning" technology. Instant Versioning was conceived to meet the real world requirement of virtually zero downtime in a system serving e-commerce transactions. Existing database systems suffer a common problem when a database crash occurs. The system has to be rebuilt and re-indexed at the cost of many hours or typically days of very expensive downtime during which no e-commerce can occur. FrontBase’s "Instant Versioning" software simply does not require any rebuilding after a crash, so the system is back up and available in seconds. Instant Versioning is such a unique concept it has been patented.

FrontBase, Inc. is a privately held, multinational company with facilities in Copenhagen, London, Boston, Seattle and Corporate Headquarters in Los Angeles. FrontBase is fast becoming known as a technological leader in the database industry by providing unique and demonstrable innovations, and through a commitment to exceptional service.

www.frontbase.com, tel.: 949-455-2913