Suggestion: InterBase Desktop Community Deployment License (up to 999 free deployments)?

[PeterPanettone 186]

Developer Benefits

1. Low Barrier to Entry:
   Developers could actually deploy small-scale desktop apps using InterBase without worrying about licensing costs until their product gains traction.

2. Encourages Ecosystem Use:
   More developers would choose InterBase instead of bundling SQLite, Firebird, or other free engines — especially when starting small projects or prototypes.

3. Smooth Scaling Path:
   Once a developer exceeds 999 deployments, paying for a commercial license would feel natural — they’d already be invested in InterBase and likely earning revenue.

4. Better Integration:
   InterBase is deeply integrated into Delphi (e.g., FireDAC, IBX, RAD Server). Giving developers an affordable way to ship with it would strengthen the “Delphi stack” story.

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🧭 Embarcadero’s Strategic Benefits

1. Increased Market Adoption:
   Free/low-tier deployments would drastically expand InterBase’s presence in real-world applications, especially among small ISVs and consultants.

2. Future Paid Upgrades:
   Once developers and customers rely on InterBase, it becomes easier to justify upgrades to full Server or ToGo editions.

3. Competitive Positioning:
   Competitors like Firebird and PostgreSQL are completely free. Without a similar entry-level offer, developers naturally default to them — even within Delphi.

4. Brand Reinforcement:
   A “999-deployment free” edition would show goodwill and support toward indie developers — something that strengthens the overall perception of Delphi and Embarcadero as developer-friendly.

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⚙️ Possible Implementation

• Edition: InterBase Desktop Community

• Limit: Up to 999 deployments or 50 concurrent users

• Restrictions: No clustering, no encryption, etc.

• Automatic upgrade path to paid license.

[aehimself 435]

If you want something on a discount (or free!!!) having your campaign ran by ChatGPT diminishes your credibility.

Just my 2 cents.

[Frickler 17]

One problem with InterBase are the really limited capabilities of it's sql dialect. Apart from some special functions like "change views" ("who did what when to our data?") and cryptography, the capabilities haven't changed much for decades. Merge? Nope. Returning? Nope. Multi action triggers? Nope. Database triggers (e.g. on connect)? Nope. Collations for unicode character sets such as UTF8? Nope. But hey, who needs unicode, when you can have dBase for DOS character sets. String functions apart from "upper()"? Nope. Of course, there is a UDF lib for that - but it's limited to strings no longer than 80 chars. But who needs UDFs anyway, when all work is done using esql, api functions or Delphi FDQuery('select * from foo where bar') and then good ol' "while not eof do", "append/post" or "edit/post" - instead of complex SQL-INSERT or SQL-UPDATE statements. I watched that Interbase 15 webinar to see if there were any news on that, but no.

[corneliusdavid 292]

6 hours ago, Frickler said:

Database triggers (e.g. on connect)? Nope.

Good points. I just want to question this one: IB has had Insert/Update/Delete triggers for a long time. Not native OnConnect but that's an event in the database component in your application code.

[Anders Melander 2203]

8 hours ago, Frickler said:

Collations for unicode character sets such as UTF8?

Aren't you confusing encoding and collation? AFAIK Interbase does support the UTF8 character set but since UTF8 is an encoding, with no natural order, the ordering of UTF8 is based on Unicode codepoints. Is that really what you want?

[Frickler 17]

10 hours ago, Anders Melander said:

Aren't you confusing encoding and collation? AFAIK Interbase does support the UTF8 character set but since UTF8 is an encoding, with no natural order, the ordering of UTF8 is based on Unicode codepoints. Is that really what you want?

With Firebird I can have collations for UTF8, for example case insensitive german:

CREATE COLLATION UNICODE_DE_CI
FOR UTF8
FROM UNICODE
CASE INSENSITIVE
'locale=de@collation=phonebook';

With InterBase this is impossible.

[Frickler 17]

12 hours ago, corneliusdavid said:

Good points. I just want to question this one: IB has had Insert/Update/Delete triggers for a long time. Not native OnConnect but that's an event in the database component in your application code.

And now someone is using a tool like dBeaver to access my database apart from my application. An "on connect" trigger can log this. My application knows nothing about it.

Edited October 24 by Frickler

[HGRogers 0]

Does it really not support MERGE ? Never even thought to check!