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About InterBase Installation Info
A little information about me and why this site exists:
After 10 1/2 years at my previous employer I started working for a new company in January 2003. I currently work as a senior developer for a software company called Advanced Productivity Software. APS makes time-tracking software and is the main competitor for one of the products where I used to work. APS did a press release when I started. It was weird proofreading a press release about myself. There are two great things about the job change. The first is that APS was generous enough to allow me to work from my house since they are based in a Atlanta and I'm in Texas. This means that after 15 years of one to two hour daily commutes to work, I no longer have to drive to work. Woo hoo!!! The other change is in what I do on a day-to-day basis. I spent over 10 years managing the development and testing teams where I used to work. For the first 5 years I was managing R&D as well as the support and training departments. I would spend huge portions of my day doing administrative things and very little time on actually coding or creating things. I now have no management responsibilities at APS so I spent my time programming and writing specification documents (writing specs is not my favorite thing, but it has to be done).
TP/BP/Delphi has always been my favorite development environment/tool. I have been playing with C# and .NET a bit now as well.
I got started with InterBase in 1995 when we were working on the new client/server version of our time-tracking software where I used to work. The goal of that product was to be as open and flexible as possible. We supported InterBase, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, Informix and Paradox. We had a number of customers using Paradox because it was free. Unfortunately, most of these customers began experiencing database corruption problems. We needed to find an inexpensive, rock-solid database engine replacement for our customers who were using Paradox. We investigated several alternatives and decided to go with InterBase. We became an InterBase VAR in 1997. Within 3 years we had deployed over 9,000 seats of InterBase.
We used Wise as the installation package to install our software. After we became an InterBase VAR, we created a Wise script for installing InterBase. This allowed us to integrate installing InterBase with our existing scripts. After InterBase was released as an open-source product in July 2000, we decided to contribute our Wise scripts to the InterBase community. The Wise scripts were created based on our scripts that we had been using for InterBase 5.x and the InterBase 5.5 Embedded Installation Guide.
With the all of the confusion during the InterBase 6.0 open-source fiasco that started in late 1999 and went through 2000 there was a lack of information available on how to install and deploy InterBase. I would see the same installation related questions asked over and over again in the newsgroups. As an effort to try to meet the need for providing information about how to install InterBase, the InterBase Installation Info site was born.
I was a huge fan of InterBase. It is a great little database. I was a big InterBase supporter and promoter. I was asked to participate in the InterBase Advisory Council in early 1999. InterBase used a quote from me on the IB 6.0, 6.5, 7.0 and 7.1 Data Sheet. Unfortunately, since I left my previous employer I haven't done much with InterBase and have sort of been out of the loop as to what is going on in the community. I have a lot of catching up to do--especially with what's been going on with Firebird.
I was fortunate to be selected as a speaker for BorCon 2001. I did a presentation on installing InterBase. The paper and slides from that presentation can be found on this site as well. I decided to try doing the InterBase installation session as a more lengthy pre-conference tutorial in 2002. I was selected as a speaker for BorCon 2002, but due to lack of interest (i.e. paid sign ups for the pre-conference tutorial), my session was cancelled. I wasn't told it was cancelled until right before the conference, but Borland was generous enough to let me still come as a speaker with all of the speaker benefits even though I wasn't speaking--way cool!
I hope that you find this site beneficial. If you have any suggestions or comments about this site, please send an email message to me at ibinstall@ibinstall.defined.net.
David R. Robinson
Revised September 2003