As I have been getting further along in NET, and as I was also no
longer satisfied with the dB vendor I had chosen previously for a number of
reasons, I have recently spent a good deal of time looking at and trying out
various dB's, and to be honest, they're all good depending upon who you talk
to! Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses and so it really becomes
something you can only decide by looking at and trying them out for
yourself.
I can tell you that I stopped deployment of two applications that
were due to be delivered soon, and will also make alterations to a few
others when it's time for them to be upgraded simply because of the change I
made. I had been using the Nexus dB for the last three years, however I
lost faith in their abilities and have concerns with their business ethics.
Advantage, which is supposedly a great company, is very slow on
getting back with any real help or information despite the fact that they
have a very good sales team that has bothered me over the years more than
any other!
Vista has some very good points to explore and in talking to their
users I found a great deal of satisfaction, however I was unable to get
their latest version to work with my setup and again, they haven't gotten
back to me with any help despite several requests.
Firebird one hears a great deal about, and it is free! We even have
as one of our members of the dB list one of it's most respected advocates
who has published on the dB, "Helen Borrie". Again, I hear a lot about it
but the community itself is not likely to offer much help to newbies who ask
basic questions. And their documentation, although abundant, is very
difficult to understand and keep in focus. I honestly did not get the
chance to really try Firebird out because after a month of asking questions
on various Firebird servers, I still hadn't managed to get a rundown of the
basic steps I required to setup and begin using it.
Like you I've never had the need to get into SQL, although I've read
up on it and have wanted to give it a try. Most of the work I do is for
small businesses and for equally small networks or embedded systems, so
direct table access methods have suited me just fine. I don't require the
extra layer of abstraction that SQL entails.
And so with all this, and more, in mind, I started looking at Object
Oriented Databases, like Db40, Cache', and a few others you can Google for.
Their overall simplicity in design and use is a breath of fresh air compared
to the traditional RDBMS's, and for most saving and then accessing data is
as simple as a class's own Get and Set methods! For example, just today I
began a new test project in my NET studies which involved the creation of a
simple class that had nothing more than a constructor and 9 string fields.
All that I had to do to store an instance of my class was to write four
little lines of code! And it's even less to access all the stored classes
of that type and select the one needed by one of the fields designed for
that purpose! In most RDBMS's, just to do the same thing, one must create a
datamodule, add a bunch of components, set a lot of properties, design
tables with fields and indexes, then make sure the dB is active before
anything useful can be done!
Granted I've yet to use the dB in a whole application, but from what
I've read in their forums, the majority are very pleased and work in all
sizes and types of applications! And best of all, they've answered every
question I've posted, quickly, directly, and without making me feel stupid!
The only drawback to these types that I was able to see, was in
total cost of use. Their published fees are all quite high with a variety
of service and deployment models to choose from. However upon writing to
three of these vendors, I've been assured that they do work with small
developers to ensure profitability no matter the size of their account.
Others have quoted me discounts of up to 60%! And most have a gpl for
personal and give-a-way work as well! So I've begun working with dB40 as I
said, and unless I hit a brick wall that I haven't yet foreseen, I don't
imagine looking back!
from Robert Meek dba Tangentals Design CCopyright 2006
Proud to be a moderator of "The Delphi Lists" at elists.org
(["An unused program is the consequence of a higher logic!", nil]) As
written in The Compendium of Accepted Robotic and Surrlogic Theorems Used in
the Self Analysis of Elemental Positronic Pathways...1st Edition Revised
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of John Wilson
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 3:02 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Database Alternatives (Chris Stebbing)
> Hi All,
>
> I've avoided using SQL now for many years as I really don't want to
> spend the time to learn that stuff. Flat files or a simple
> master-detail are really good enough for me.
>
> But... I need an alternative. I've been using Absolute database but
> their filtering performance is well behind the rest. I'm thinking of
> Access but I seem to be having trouble using indexes as I get a
> "current provider does not support the necessary interface for Index
> functionality" error.
>
> Can anyone advise a suitable alternative? I'm using D2005 although I
> do have access to D2006.
>
> Standard application for me is a flat file table with 500,000 records
> around the 100Mb mark. I need to be able to filter and run analysis
> on the filtered table. I use the raw filter strings as this gives me
> the most flexibility - perhaps it's just because I'm used to it.
>
> Cheers,
> Chris.
>
Hi Chris,
That 'SQL stuff' is maybe more useful than you could possibly imagine,
and a lot simpler to learn than you might think. Sure, you can get
fairly hairy with it, but there's a lot of things even a simple sql
query can do for you.
That aside, have you considered using DBISAM from Elevate Software
(http://www.elevatesoft.com/) at all ? I've had some experience with it
at some of our customers and I can vouch for its strength and speed.
It's not free (unfortunately!), but it has intelligent indexing (and
some killer 'SQL stuff' :P) and the filtering is very powerful too.
We've used it on tables that are over 1.6GB in size without any crashes,
and I can strongly recommend it. It supports cursors as well, so you can
scroll backwards and forwards through your datasets.
Another alternative is to convert your data to a textual format (e.g.
XML) and use ,Net datasets (tho I wouldn't recommend it!), or our own
TextFileParser and TextDSN products (available from
http://www.gwacc.com/software.htm) which will let you use a simple
delimited (comma, tab etc.) text file as a database via ODBC.
I'll be honest though: If you're not willing to learn SQL, then you may
be destined for the slow road :\
Kind regards.
John.
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