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kjum...@aol.com (KJumoke) wrote:
>As far as database systems go, which of these is the best. ?
Btrieve, by far. It is proven, reliable, fault tolerant, and very
fast.
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>Given all the reports of problems with Paradox in a network environment,
>such as lock files, Pdoxusrs.net, index out of date etc, how suitable is
>Paradox for a shrink-wrap application, given that it is impossible to go
>to every customer's site to fix these problems?
>Btrieve seems to be popular in shrink-wrap applications, especially
>accounting packages. Foxpro I really don't know much about. It does not
>seem to offer much over Paradox
>Are there any folks out there with experience of all three who can give a
>definitive answer?. Given these Paradox problems I am considering
>switching to Btrieve as it seems to lack such problems. The preference of
>accounts developers for Btrieve seems to make it a better package.
I started a Delphi app using Paradox but quickly abandoned it due to
speed and reliability on a network. I switched to Btrieve since the
app was to work with a DOS-based Btrieve accounting package. I've
never gone back.
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>I would like to use the Btrieve ODBC drivers for users interactive usage
>and use Titan or native Btrieve access to execute rapid updates and scans
>in the background with a DLL. How good are these?
Stay far away from ODBC. My app is written entirely without the BDE
at all. Purchase the Btrieve Developers Kit from Btrieve
Technologies. Go directly to the API. You don't need Titan unless
you cannot live without data aware controls. I personally don't like
data-aware controls because the remove control from the user, but that
is a personal view. I feel you write a much better program without
these controls. It takes a few more lines of code to fill text boxes
and a loop or two to fill a grid...but the app is 100% better.
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>Another thing is Btrieve blobs. Can I get the equivalents of Paradox OLE,
>Memo, Formatted Memo, Binary, byte etc in Btrieve. How easy is it to
>program these?
Btrieve supports what they call variable length Notes, which is
another name for a memo field. The maximum size of a memo field
depends upon the size of the rest of the table. You can have one memo
per table. Yes, you can store a byte, I don't know what you mean by
Binary. Formatted memo is not supported. OLE fields are not
supported. Then again, I don't know why you would want to put an OLE
field in a database, anyway.
Feel free to write me with any other questions. You will be
completely satisfied with Btrieve. It is a wonderful database system.
The code to access the API is complete different from the JET or BDE
engines. It is 90% record based. You can do the equivalent of a
query, but is does not use 'SQL' like terms. The API does require a
period for 'learning' the API. It is quite different, like I said
above.
Give it a try. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Alan Olson
Salon Systems
a...@execpc.com
