We are happy to announce that today Embarcadero has released a new version of its InterBase flagship database engine, InterBase 2020 Update 5. With this release, the company continues to improve the product’s quality and usability.

IBConsole UX Redesigned

InterBase 2020 Update 5 includes a brand new release of IBCconsole, which is a significant update of the tool compared to the past. The changes encompass IBConsole appearance and functionality and have the goal to improve its usability and make it look and behave in a more modern way. 

As part of this UI and UX project, we added support for HighDPI monitors, replaced the icons with new ones which are also higher resolution, changed fonts and default sizes, removed some of the user interface “clutter” (in terms of lines, borders, and repeated images), and made many other changes to make it a modern Windows app. Below you can see the old UI on the left and new UI on the right, for the same operation: Notice how the tool UX now favors tabs compared to modal dialogs when possible:

Another change was the addition of search and filter results on different parts of IBConsole, which makes easier finding specific items or actions:

• Search and filter items on the Multi-Purpose Section.
• Quickly find servers and databases listed on the Server Tree
• Quickly find Tables, Views, or Fields on the Interactive SQL Window.

Overall, we think that the new version improves navigation and that the tabbed content provides a more organized way to drill down on elements.

Here is a higher resolution image of the new IBConsole UI, showing the metadata of a table:

General Quality Improvements

InterBase 2020 Update 5 also includes other relevant changes:

• InterBase IBToGo support for iOS Simulator running in ARM64 (Apple Silicon), matching the Delphi target platform
• OpenSSL updated to 1.1.1 for all primary supported platforms
• Parameterized queries can use parameters in expressions with concatenation and arithmetic operators, also within CAST()
• The gstat tool now provides more statistics about blobs, including the blob count per table at various levels
• The release also included fixes for relevant customer reported issues

Recent Drivers Enhancements

Since the last release of InterBase, the team has expanded the available drivers adding to the RAD Studio libraries and the classic ODBC driver some further improvements to the ADO.NET driver and a new one for Python. See https://blogs.embarcadero.com/interbase-now-avaialble-to-millions-of-developers-using-python/ and https://www.embarcadero.com/new-tools/python#ib-python-driver for more information

Additional Licensing Options

It’s also worth noticing that since the last release of InterBase 2020, the company has been offering additional licensing opportunities for the embedded version of InterBase:

• The embedded IBLite is now freely available not only to RAD Studio customers, but to any developer interested in it. See https://www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase/lite/free-download for more information
• The embedded IBToGo, with encryption support, change views, and additional extra features, is offered with a yearly subscription license for deployment in an unlimited number of copies with your apps. See https://blogs.embarcadero.com/embarcadero-introduces-a-brand-new-ibtogo-subscription-offer/ for more information

More Information on InterBase

InterBase is a powerful, zero-administration, small footprint database engine that can power your server and even run on your mobile devices as an embedded database. InterBase 2020 added a number of new features, including tablespaces support for InterBase server, new OS platform support for embedded versions, enhanced performance monitoring, SQL optimizations and more. 

You can find more information on InterBase and the 2020 at the following links:

• The product page on the Embarcadero company website, https://www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase 
• The product documentation site, https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/InterBase/2020/en/Main_Page 
• The Update 5 Release Notes at https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/InterBase/2020/en/What%27s_New_in_InterBase_2020_Update_5 

If you are an existing customer, the new version of the product is available on https://my.embarcadero.com (where you can download the patch kits or the complete installers for Update 5, for both Windows and Linux), otherwise you can download the trial version at https://www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase/developer/free-download 

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