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Connecting to a database. BDE? ADO?
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Page 2: The Borland Database Engine
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Join the Discussion
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"Post your views and comments to this chapter of the free Delphi database Programming Course"
Discuss!
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The BDE is a common data access layer for all of Borland's products, including Delphi and C++Builder. The BDE consists of a collection of DLLs and utilities. The beauty of the BDE is the fact that all of the data manipulation is considered "transparent" to the developer.
BDE comes with a set of drivers that enables your application to talk to several different types of databases. These drivers translate high-level database commands (such as open or post) and tasks (record locking or SQL construction) into commands specific to a particular database type: Paradox, dBASE, MS Access or any ODBC data source. The BDE API (Application Programming Interface) consists of more than 200 procedures and functions, which are available through the BDE unit. Fortunately, you almost never need to call any of these routines directly. Instead, you use the BDE through the VCL's data access components, which are found on the Data Access page of Component Palette. To access the particular database the application only needs to know the Alias for the database and it will have access to all data in that database. The alias is set up in the BDE Administrator and specifies driver parameters and database locations.
The BDE ships with a collection of database drivers, allowing access to a wide variety of data sources. The standard (native) BDE drivers include Paradox, dBase, MS Access, ASCII text. Of course, any ODBC driver can also be used by the BDE through the ODBC Administrator.
Delphi applications that use the BDE to access databases require that you distribute the BDE with the application. When deploying the BDE with an application, you must use InstallShield Express or another Borland
certified installation program.
The BDE has several advantages as well as disadvantages as a database engine. It's not my intention to discuss about why and when you should (or not) use the BDE approach over some non-BDE technique.
Since this course is about ADO/MSAccess the rest of the course will focus on this non-BDE database approach.
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