InterBase Database: InterBase Labs and Tutorials

Through a series of step-by-step instructional videos, Stephen Ball and Al Mannarino, veteran InterBase trainers, will guide you to a deeper understanding of this powerful database. You will gain the solid foundation of knowledge upon which to use this amazing database for your most creative projects.

The beauty of InterBase is not only that it's a full featured, high performance, scalable database but that it is easy to install, is cost effective, requires zero administration, and has a tiny footprint so you can easily embed it into your business critical applications.

Get started:

Next step, watch these step-by-step tutorials designed to be very simple so that even if you are not experienced with database technologies, you should be able to embed a database and test your application.

Tutorial Videos

Introduction to IBConsole

In this short video, Stephen Ball, will demonstrate IBConsole, showing you how easily you can configure and maintain an InterBase database server.

Introduction to iSQL

Get a closer look at iSQL command line interface with Stephen Ball

Installing InterBase
on the Mac

Need to have your backend embeddable database run on Mac OS X? Watch this step by step tutorial on how to install InterBase on Mac OS X.

Creating a New Database
with InterBase

In this tutorial, learn how to create a new blank database using IBConsole. Learn about the different options you can potentially choose and why the default options are typically the best to use.

Creating Tables Smartly with InterBase Domains

In this tutorial (following on from the previous tutorial where we created a blank database) we learn how to add tables and introduce the idea of InterBase Domains to help manage field types consistently across the database, speeding up database administration and assisting table wide consistency in your data model

Catching Data Changes - Introduction to Triggers

Triggers help you centralize business logic into the database by notifying you of changes to data either BEFORE or AFTER it happens, ensuring you can run checks and changes in a consistent manner (no matter who/or what program is connected to the database). In this session, we introduce Triggers, something that we will combine over the coming videos with other InterBase features to enable extended business logic in action.

Creating Unique Values - Introducing InterBase Generators to make an Automatic Primary Key

In this tutorial, we will introduce Generators with an example that will combine with a trigger to create unique values for a record as its inserted into the database. Generators are unique Integer values that are specific to each database. You can use Generators from negative Integer to positive Integer to get unique values for use in, for example, primary keys. Using Generators is a positive thing as they are managed by the database to ensure their uniqueness. You can have multiple Generators on any database

Expanding InterBase SQL -
An Introduction
to User Defined

One of the great things about InterBase is that if you can't do something in SQL, you can always add in a UDF to help you make it possible! In this tutorial, we combine database programming with some Delphi development to expand the SQL syntax of InterBase using User Defined Functions (UDF's). Simply put, UDF's are libraries that contain quick, simple functions that calculate a result on data passed in.

Protect your data! Introducing InterBase Exceptions

InterBase has the ability to raise customized exceptions when something happens that you want to prevent. In this tutorial, we will learn how we can implement advanced business logic into a database to ensure that only valid data is entered. The example we follow ensures that data entered in a Tax ID field passed advanced check sum checking, and prevents the data being added if it fails the checks. Although you don't need to use UDF, this simple example is a natural follow on to the Triggers and UDF tutorials.