Delphi Newbies!!

[baronne]

Hi,

I know this may sound pathetic, but we have been asked to trial out a few
different development tools such as Delphi and Visual Studio as our new
development platform. What's really difficult for us, is that we have been
using Paradox 8 for years, and this is all we know!!!
What we need to achieve is really quite simple : We have an ERP system
called Visual Manufacturing (Lilly Software Associates - now Infor Global)
which runs on a SQLBase 7.6.1 database (Gupta). With Paradox and some
Crystal Report writing, we have been using a plain old ODBC connection to
connect to our database.

Now, diving into Delphi 2005 is like going from crawling to flying a space
rocket!!! So this is a little cry for help. Where do we begin? All we want
to do is connect to our database and create a basic little app? We're lost
in .NET, ADO and all the other weird terminology we aren't used to.

Baronne & Steve

 

[donvittorio]

The delphi.about.com website has lots of useful tutorials, they have a Beginner's Guide To Delphi Database Programming at

http://delphi.about.com/od/database/a/databasecourse.htm

Steve

 

[svanels]

It looks like Gupta is a Client-Server RDBMS so there are some big differences with Paradox (desktop system)

From what I understand you have been using paradox to take snap shots of the data and manupilate it to make reports with crystal reports. A lot of other people use M$ SQL-server together with M$ Access in the same way.

Delphi and Paradox are both products from Borland, thus in all versions regardless personal, evaluation, professional or enterprise you will find native drivers for paradox.

One advice, stay away from net and ado, although they are supported by Borland. Ado comes embedded with all current Windows versions because it is from Microsoft. The net hype, I classify the same way.
Bottom line you will be tied to the MS operating system.

Gupta runs on Unix, Linux and probably also on Windows.

It is not impossible that using Ado you can connect to a Unix box, (I don't know how), but ado is Windows thing, just like .net.

My advice stay with Delphi, and go to the link provided by donvittorio.

.Net was invented by MS trying to connect to other operating systems, something Borland have done years ago, with Delphi 6 and Kylix.

Steven van Els
SAvanEls@cq-link.sr