A shared server supports more clients on the same hardware and still improves the system responsiveness. The server's shared metadata cache reduces the compilation costs for requests and make procedures and triggers more efficient. User and database statistics kept by the server are useful for diagnosing application hot spots. Java Enablement Java and InterBase are a natural pair. Java applications access InterBase through InterClient, a high performance JDBC driver.
Deployment is simple, since configuring machines with client libraries is unnecessary.
InterClient makes upgrading easier as well, because database upgrades on the server never make your client obsolete. The database we picked had to perform searches on millions of records. It had to scale to meet our projected requirements well into the future. Finally, as a city agency, we were under strict budget and management constraints. The InterBase design doesn't require hours of maintenance or a PhD in InterBase tuning.