Fast, multi-threaded, cross-platform engine
Relational integrity constraints (including deferred constraint checking and referential actions)
Statistical query optimiser that takes constraints and relationships into consideration
Transaction handling (includes DDL statements, e.g. schema definition)
Security privileges
Views
Sub-selects
Set operations (union, intersect and except)
Supports ISO standard Core SQL plus additional ISO packages
Procedures and functions (using the standard PSM syntax)
Large object handling for multimedia applications (using the standard syntax)
Designed for modern operating systems and hardware
Developed using modern object-orientated languages and tools
Multi-version concurrency control:
- Readers never block other users
- Writers never block readers
- User transactions can be isolated from other users' changes for consistent results
Fast recovery after power-failure or rollback
On-line (non-blocking) index building
On-line backups
Native ODBC 3.5 driver
Native dbExpress™ driver (for Kylix™/Delphi™ access)
dbExpress driver can be linked into your applications for easy deployment
Native JDBC™ driver (for Java™ access)
Native Python DB-API module
Bloat-free and easy to deploy:
- the server is a single executable
- each API driver is a single file
- uses the operating system for thread control and TCP/IP without the need for extra drivers
- each catalog, which can comprise multiple users and schemas, is stored in a single file
- royalty-free distribution
The current system aims to conform to ISO/IEC SQL-99 Core SQL with many enhanced SQL features already implemented, including much of:
and most of:
and some features from the forthcoming standard.
The ODBC driver conforms to Microsoft's 3.5 core level with many features from level 1 and level 2. The JDBC driver conforms to Sun's JDBC 2.0 standard. The Python DB-API module conforms to the Python DB-API 2.0 specification.