Pervasive Software set up a "Btrieve Society" to recognise existing developers. They have a committed and loyal developer-base and according to company literature, they remain fully committed to the product. (later renamed Pervasive Software), and Actian Corporation. It was primarily the change-over from pre-image paging to shadow-paging, which necessitated radical file format changes, that caused compatibility issues between version 6 and previous versions.ītrieve has been owned and developed by four different companies: SoftCraft, Novell, Btrieve Technologies, Inc. To avoid database corruption, Btrieve uses two methods of updating records: pre-image paging in Btrieve versions before 6.0, and shadow paging in subsequent versions. The file control record contains important information about Btrieve files, such as the number of pages in current use. Logical are mapped to physical pages (pages at a fixed location in the file) on the disk by page allocation tables. Beginning with version 6.0 logical pages were used. The file had an index for searching that linked to physical pages. Versions prior to 6.0 merely used data pages, index pages and a file control record. The Btrieve file format consists entirely of pages, which are the data that move between memory and storage when the engine performs an input/output operation. System transactions were developed to allow multiple transactions to be done in a batch and to make data recovery easier. This has enabled them to support both their Btrieve navigational database engine and an SQL-based engine, Scalable SQL.Ĭurrent versions of Btrieve support system transactions and user transactions, where system transactions are a bundle of non-transactional operations and/or user transactions, whereas user transactions are transactions that work on actual data in the database. A key part of Pervasive's architecture is the use of a MicroKernel Database Engine, which allows different database backends to be modularised and integrated easily into their DBMS package, Pervasive.SQL. It uses ISAM as its underlying indexing and storage mechanism. Early descriptions of Btrieve referred to it as a record manager (though Pervasive initially used the term navigational database but later changed this to transactional database) because it only deals with the underlying record creation, data retrieval, record updating and data deletion primitives. The MKDE model allows for different database backends to be plugged into Pervasive's productītrieve is not a relational database management system (RDBMS).
WHAT IS PERVASIVE PSQL V11 UPGRADE
Customers were encouraged to upgrade to Pervasive.SQL, which supported both SQL and Btrieve applications.
Btrieve continued for a few years while ScalableSQL was quickly dropped. Shortly thereafter the Btrieve and ScalableSQL products were combined into the products sold as Pervasive.SQL or PSQL, and later Actian Zen. After these versions were released (Btrieve 6.15 and ScalableSQL v4) the company was renamed to Pervasive Software prior to their IPO. The Btrieve front-end supported the Btrieve API and the other front-end was called Scalable SQL, a relational database product based upon the MKDE that used its own variety of Structured Query Language, otherwise known as SQL.
(BTI).ītrieve was modularized starting with version 6.15 and became one of two database front-ends that plugged into a standard software interface called the MicroKernel Database Engine. After some reorganization within Novell, it was decided in 1994 to spin off the product and technology to Doug and Nancy Woodward along with Ron Harris, to be developed by a new company known as Btrieve Technologies, Inc. The product gained significant market share as a database embedded in mid-market applications in addition to being embedded in every copy of NetWare 2.x, 3.x and 4.x since it was available on every NetWare network. After gaining market share and popularity, it was acquired from Doug and Nancy Woodward by Novell in 1987, for integration into their NetWare operating system in addition to continuing with the DOS version. Around the same time as the release of the first IBM PCs, Doug received 50% of the company as a wedding gift and later purchased the remainder from his brother.
Btrieve was written by Doug Woodward and Nancy Woodward and initial funding was provided in part by Doug's brother Loyd Woodward. It was originally a record manager published by SoftCraft. There have been several versions of the product for DOS, Linux, older versions of Microsoft Windows, 32-bit IBM OS/2 and for Novell NetWare. It is based on Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM), which is a way of storing data for fast retrieval. Btrieve is a transactional database ( navigational database) software product.