Straight answers — including the questions people actually ask on the R:BASE® listserv, not just the flattering ones.
It's Claude connected directly to your R:BASE® database over a live, read-only connection, so you can ask plain-English questions and get real answers from your real data — instead of writing a query, building a report, or waiting on IT.
No. It connects to your database as it already exists, through R:BASE®'s own ODBC driver. Your tables, forms, applications, and existing reports stay exactly as they are.
Anything you'd otherwise write a query or a report for — "which customers haven't ordered in a while," "what are our best-selling products this quarter," "show me every invoice over $10,000 that's still open." It can also help draft R:BASE® command files, forms, and documentation, and check incoming data for outliers or likely errors.
The AI Assistant itself only reads — it runs read-only queries and never writes back to your database. Development-assistance features, like drafting a form or a command file, produce something a developer reviews and applies; they don't touch your live data directly.
Not entirely, and we'd rather tell you the real shape of it than oversell it. When you ask a question, that question and the specific query results needed to answer it — never your whole database, never a bulk export — are sent to Claude to generate the response.
What doesn't happen: R:BASE® never gives Claude write access, your full database isn't uploaded anywhere, and by default Anthropic does not train its models on that data.
For organizations that need the entire round trip to stay inside their own cloud boundary, Claude is also available through Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI — that keeps the request and response inside your own AWS or Google Cloud tenancy under your own governance, rather than going to Anthropic's servers directly. We can scope that option for you if data residency is a hard requirement.
Just what's configured ahead of time. Which databases and tables it can query is scoped when it's set up — it's not open-ended access to your R:BASE® server, it's exactly what's been exposed to it, the same way you'd scope any other integration today.
No. By default, Anthropic does not use API inputs or outputs to train its models — that's a standing policy for the commercial API, separate from consumer Claude.ai plans.
Partially, and it's worth being precise rather than overselling it. Anthropic offers a Zero Data Retention option for much of its core API, but its own documentation currently lists MCP tool-use data — the mechanism this integration uses — as not eligible for that option, so data returned through the connection follows Anthropic's standard commercial retention policy rather than zero retention.
For most customers that's a non-issue. If a zero-retention guarantee is a hard requirement for you, tell us up front and we'll work through the options together, including the Bedrock and Vertex AI routing mentioned above.
No. The machine running the AI Assistant needs outbound internet access to reach Claude, over a connection you control. Nothing about this setup opens an inbound path into your R:BASE® database from the outside.
Yes — like any tool that interprets a question and writes a query, it can misread an ambiguous request or misjudge a query. That's exactly why it only reads real data and shows you the underlying table alongside its answer, rather than a paragraph you have to take on faith: you can check anything it tells you against the same rows it used.
No — it's meant to remove the wait for a report that already has a right answer, not the judgment calls that come after. Anything that matters gets the same review it always would.
Both depend on your database, how many systems you want connected, and how much hands-on setup you want from us — there's no single honest number for every R:BASE® installation out there. That's what the free consultation is for: a concrete quote and timeline for your specific system, before you commit to anything.
It connects through R:BASE®'s own ODBC driver, so if your system can already connect over ODBC, it's a strong starting point — no forced upgrade for a well-maintained older installation. We'll confirm compatibility with your specific version as part of the consultation.
Yes — that's the point of the free AI Readiness Consultation. We'll connect to a read-only copy or a sample of your data and run real questions live, the same way we've been demonstrating it on the R:BASE® listserv.
R:BASE® Technologies, Inc. (rbase.com), the company behind the R:BASE® database engine itself, and RAM Data Systems, Inc. (ramdatasystems.com), a solution provider and consulting company that has built and supported R:BASE® systems for decades.
Yes. The AI Assistant is a direct extension of that ongoing development — a way to bring the database forward for the systems already running it in production, rather than asking anyone to replace what already works.
Ask it directly — on the listserv, by email, or on a short call. If it's a good question, it'll probably end up on this page next.
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