FrontBase is now available for free. Please see the FrontBase website http://www.frontbase.com for details.

Useful SQL commands in FrontBase

// writes an ascii backup of your database
write all output(dir='/path/to/export/dir', type = 'FrontBase', content=true);

// creates a database from the exported files that results from the previous command
SCRIPT <path-to-export-directory>/schema.sql; 

// to rename a table
alter table name Item to ItemArchive;

If you don't use type='FrontBase', you end up losing precision on your timestamp columns, which can really suck.

A first experience with FrontBase, WO 5.3.1 and MacOSX 10.4.6

Make sure you have the FrontBase jdbc connector accessible from your WebObjects applications. I placed mine in /Library/Java/Extensions/
Make sure that the FrontBasePlugIn.framework is located in /Library/Java/Frameworks
Make sure that you have added the framework to your project or you will not be able to establish a connection to your database, even though you'll be able to see your database from EOModeler.
If you haven't yet assigned a User/Password combination to your database, you still must include User information in order for the connection to be established. Use _system to get started. The URL for basic connection is: jdbc:FrontBase://localhost/my_database_name

The documentation available at the Frontbase site is very complete. The only gotcha was that I was left with the impression the framework was only necessary for WebObjects 4.5 and below. This is not the case, you have to install and include it for WO 5 projects too.

Migration from MySQL

In most cases the datatypes are exactly the same. Here are the FrontBase equivalents for common datatypes in MySQL that are different:

TEXT --> CLOB

DATETIME --> TIMESTAMP

INT --> INTEGER

MEDIUMBLOB --> BLOB