If you use and love Paradox more power to you. I'm not saying Paradox isn't
for some people. Obviously there are plenty of cases where it works great.
That just wasn't the case for me. I'm saying that IN MY EXPERIENCE it was
not a good solution at all for us. I know of many other people that feel
the same way too.
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>One user's PC locking up or dropped network connections
>often caused index corruption.
======
Not a Paradox issue.
It is when that corrupts the index or tables. There's no way you can
prevent someone's PC or network connection from dropping. A database system
that gets corrupted when this happens isn't very reliable IMHO--that's why
people use client/server or multi-tier database sytems. Someone using a
client/server database (MS SQL, IB, Sybase, Informix, DB2, Oracle, etc.)
that has a user's PC or network connection drop isn't going to get a corrupt
database or index because only the server process is manipulating the
database.
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>Granted, we did have some bonehead customers that used
>Paradox because it was free and would use it with 60 or 100
>concurrent users
========
Should not be a Paradox or BDE problem either.
ANY file based database (access, pdox, dbase, etc.) where the clients are
all directly manipulating the data and index files is going to have problems
when you have 100 concurrent users all hitting the database simultaneously.
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>However, we had problems with just 10 or 20 users as well.
========
You shouldn't
We did. In theory, Windows should run without needing a reboot either. In
theory, your hard drive will last for 10 years too.
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>We eventually resolved all of the problems by changing our
>policy to only support Paradox for single-user usage and
>requiring people with more than one user to have a SQL
>(IB, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase or Informix) server.
===========
Sounds like over kill.
It worked and was the best decision for us.
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>Oh yeah, I didn't even mention all of the BDE installation
>nightmares that Corel caused either. :)
============
Corel users experience nightmares from badly written Delphi applications
too.
Perhaps, but I'm talking about BDE installations which Corel was notorious
for not doing a proper BDE installation. For example, their installer would
overwrite BDE 3.5 with BDE 3.0 or force the installation into c:\Corel. My
BDE installations never replaced a newer version with an older version.
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The bottom line is:
1. Write code that checks the BDE configuration and sets it
correctly (automatically) when your application begins.
Or better yet, don't use the BDE or Paradox.
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2. Be a nice neighbor and write your code to re-set the BDE
config back to the way you found it so other applications
that depend on the BDE won't be cursing your application.
(even though they should be responsible for checking BDE
settings from with in their own App too.)
All decent installations do this. Mine did. Corel's didn't.
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3. If your customers hardware is failing, identify the problems
"correctly" and explain to your customer that they need to
correct the problem, rather then falsely blaming the BDE
or Paradox tables.
ROFL! Yeah, right. This was an enterprise scale commerical application
that was deployed to over 150,000 users and over 600 organizations world
wide. A better solution was to do what we did--require a client/server
database engine and drop Paradox support.
It is nice to know that you have time to help all of your customers diagnose
when they have a bad NIC.
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4. Write a simple "Table Repair Repair Utility" and include
it within your application so simple problems such as indexes
can be easily repaired by your customer.
We shipped one with it. That doesn't solve the problem. When 100 users
can't enter their time and the company's revenue is based on their time
entries, they don't have time to be down while someone is running a database
index repair function. Down time is lost revenue.
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5. Don't underestimate the power of the BDE and Paradox tables.
Don't overestimate the ability of Paradox either. That's what we did in
1995 and 1996 and we paid a price for doing so.
Again, I'm not saying Paradox doesn't work for some people. It does. It
just doesn't work for me.
David R.
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