Re: [HACKERS] Inprise/Borland releasing Interbase as Opensource

At 04:29 PM 1/4/00 +0100, Jose Soares wrote:
>Don Baccus wrote:

>> They say they'll continue to sell it via their traditional channels
>> and sell support, too.
>
>They say:
>"The source code for InterBase 6 is scheduled to be published during the
first
>part of the year 2000.
>The company also announced it plans to continue to sell and support InterBase
>5.6 through normal distribution channels..."
>
>If I understand seems they refer to previous version i.e. InterBase ver. 5.6
>but version 6 will be open source, maybe...

So they'll sell 5.6 but maybe 6 will be free? Strange. Rumor on Slashdot
is that they've lost their key developers (a month or so ago).

And (in response to Jan), yeah, I know outer joins are scheduled
to be completed in 7.1. Personally, the interbase news leaves me
yawning. Postgres, since 6.5, is meeting my needs just fine.

BTW, it appears that they have "multi-generational" concurrency
control, which sounds very much like MVCC. Indeed, the white
paper describing it makes it sound as though the basic strategy
for storing tuples with transaction ids (the "generations") is
kinda similar to PostgreSQL. They support dirty reads and some
ways to specify which "generation" to read from. Might be some
ideas there worth looking at for future PostgreSQL work...

Keep in mind that I spent no more than 15 minutes trucking around
their site and docs so I picked up no more than a very, very
surface impression of stuff. (in other words, my quick impressions
may be very innaccurate).

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza(at)pacifier(dot)com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, Pacific Northwest
Rare Bird Alert Service and other goodies at
http://donb.photo.net.