Paradox is a relational database management software originally released from Ansa-Software. Now it is owned by Corel as a part of their WordPerfect office suite. A relational database is a database based on the relational model. ... Corel Corporation is a computer software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. ... WordPerfect is a word processing program; at the height of its popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the de facto standard word processor, but has since been eclipsed in sales by Microsoft Word. ...

In September 1987 Borland purchased Ansa-Software including their Paradox (version 2.0) database management tool. 1987 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Borland Software Corporation (formerly Borland International, Inc. ...

Paradox was a successful DOS-based database, competing vigorously with two other popular databases of the early nineties, Foxpro and dBase. As well as decent performance, its unique features included the Paradox Application Language (PAL) and a nice text-based windowing and menu system. The Paradox Application Language allowed for limited event driven programming and provided arrays with string indexes, which allowed creative programmers to implement a poor man's object oriented model. Visual FoxPro is a data-centric object-oriented and procedural programming language by Microsoft. ... dBASE was the first widely used database management system or DBMS for microcomputers, published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on the Apple II, Apple Macintosh and IBM PC under DOS where it became one of the best-selling software titles for a number of years. ...

Paradox later migrated to the Microsoft Windows but it never achieved much success there partly due to Microsoft's earlier release of their Microsoft Access database program. Microsoft Access is a database management system from Microsoft, packaged with Microsoft Office Professional which combines the Jet relational database engine with a graphical interface intended to make it possible for relatively unskilled programmers and non-programmer power users to build front ends to databases. ...

In the Windows environment, the Paradox Application Language (PAL) evolved into Object-PAL. Object-PAL was a completely new language and forced developers using PAL to completely rewrite their database applications in order to use the Window versions.