James’ World

I came across the Frontbase RDBMS recently. Their 288-page users manual was so nice and clear I decided to read through it.

The FrontBase project was started in 1996 for Copenhagen’s 911 service (MySQL has similar practical origins, written to support retail data warehousing contracts). They claim it’s a “database designed for the Internet” and requires zero maintenance. Currently they’re on version 4.2.

It’s a proprietary, closed-source database written in ANSI C, but free for most users. They currently charge for support and consulting, and sell licenses for embedded users. The FBAccess client library source is available on request for programmers to add support to their oses and devices.

It seems to have traction in the Mac community, likely because of the nice Mac client program and FileMaker and RealBasic support.

What’s nice is that it supports transactions and full-text search at the same time, unlike MySQL.

FrontBase supports:

- servers: Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD
- clients: FrontBaseManager Aqua client for Mac OS X allows mgmt. and monitoring, also web, common scripting languages (Perl, PHP, Tcl), JDBC, ODBC, and the sql92 console client
- SQL92
- Unicode
- statement-based replication from transaction logs
- full SQL logging options, allowing replay (SET WRITE SQL TRUE GLOBAL;)
- full-text indexing
- stored procedures
- clusters
- table spaces
- raw device driver
- live (hot) backup due to versioning (WRITE DATA;)
- data and communications encryption
- whitelisting and blacklisting of IP addresses
- row-level locking
- row-level privileges
- read-only databases (note that replication slaves are read-only)
- import utilities for Access and FileMaker
- migration tools for FileMaker (tables only) and MySQL (no enum or set column support)

They have been changing their licensing, so contact gclem at frontbase.com for the latest info.

FrontBase sure looks like a clean, modern RDBMS implementation.

I plan to learn more about its reliability and performance.

I have noticed that it is prone to crashing on Mac OS X PPC. Even a simple query like SELECT DISTINCT(OID) FROM TABLE; on 500,000 records with mostly nulls can crash the database, but hard to tell if it’s Frontbase, the OS, or what.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under BSD, Linux, MySQL, Perl, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.