PROGRESS RDBMS is an enterprise level relational database system, which successfully competes with the other popular DB systems, such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2, MS SQL Server. PROGRESS is in use by many customers worldwide, and in some countries it takes from 20% to 50% of DB market (such as Holland, Sweden, Australia and, of course, USA).

The PROGRESS RDBMS serves as the core data management and server for the PROGRESS OpenEdge family of business application development and deployment packages. Progress RDBMS is offered in three flavors. PROGRESS Personal is for stand-alone/developer use only; PROGRESS Workgroup supports up to 49 concurrent connections, and Progress Enterprise supports up to 10,000 connections. All versions support up to 32,000 each of tables, indexes, and fields per table; as well as supporting up to 500,000 database buffers or 4GB of cached DB information for improved performance.

PROGRESS has a full-featured 4GL programming language to work with the data and for the programm logic. The same language is used for the user interface programming (GUI and terminal). When working with the data, much better performance is reached, comparing with SQL access, because the data manipulation is done in some lower level, and with more smooth database access commands. PROGRESS has SQL interface too, but it is somewhat slower, so this is not a main priority of PROGRESS. The price of PROGRESS RDBMS is rather high, and is comparable to those of its competetors.

Progress RDBMS provides APIs for connecting to Progress data from external sources, as well. ODBC, JDBC, and ESQL/C access is provided through an SQL-92 Entry-Level compliant data sever that is implemented alongside the standard Progress 4GL server. Access differences are implemented within these servers themselves; both servers access and utilize the same data pool.