These notes by Glenn Lawrence © 1997

This month's meeting on 21st January was very well attended despite being on an extraordinarily hot day in the middle of the holiday season.

As no presentation was organised for this meeting it was decided to have a "round table" discussion in the foyer area on the "comfy" chairs (no - not the comfy chair! :-)

The relaxed format worked particularly well and the resulting dicussion engaged everyone's interest.

Several topics were covered, but database issues seemed to predominate. There was much discussion about the poor quality of local database access in Delphi-1, especially when using Paradox tables. It was felt that the problems were mainly due to the "Local SQL" add-on which seems to have been disowned by both the Delphi and Paradox communities.

Concerns about the quality of Delphi-2 BDE were allayed as some members indicated that it uses quite different technology. Those who have used Delphi 2 also report that it seems to be much more reliable in this regard.

Mark Weston recommended the Opus DirectAccess BDE replacement product that he uses. It makes the MS "Jet" database engine look like the BDE to Delphi.

The relative merits of navigational versus SQL style databases were discussed at length. One member outlined their problems trying to use Interbase and finding it too slow. Further discussion and analysis found that it was probably because it was being used like a navigational database such as Paradox. It seems that for pure SQL databases you have to be very careful to manage things so that the number of transactions is minimised.

David and Mark related their experiences in scaling up from desktop to client-server DBs and it was clear that if it is intended that an application could ever run in a client-server environment it should be designed from the outset (even to the point of requirements specification) to take this into account.

The use of "data-aware" controls was also found to be fraught since many of them assume a navigational model, and therefore don't scale up very well.

Mark did mention that InfoPower (a collection of data-aware controls that sit on top of the BDE) had a solution to the problem of providing an incremental search facility using TQueries rather than TTables (which is the norm in such cases) thus allowing an app to scale up to a server based DBMS.

Apropos to the discussion of BDE woes, Lance Collins brought along a copy of a Delphi bug list he found on the Net at: http://www.dataweb.nl/~r.p.sterkenburg/bugsall.htm He zipped it onto a couple of diskettes and it is now in the ADUG library for those without Net access. Thanks Lance!

The meeting closed at around 8:15 and was followed by the usual committee meeting. Committee meeting minutes are available to ADUG members from the ADUG Secretary.