Buggy Delphi BDE FoxPro Native Driver

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Borland Database Engine Native Drivers, for accessing dBase & Foxpro data files have always been buggy , this also applies to SQL Links for Oracle, as well as MS SQL and others (we'll talk about this subject in an upcoming future article ) . ADO access components never worked as expected due to the fact that Borland was in a rat-race with Microsoft to release it's premier development environment which competes with VB and Visual C...

We wasted a lot of time and effort trying to migrate our Foxpro based database apps to Delphi-built front end applications, and encountered many problems due to the fact that the drivers were never tested properly. After searching for a solution to the problem , we found the following posting on Borland's site

"Extended testing of the FoxPro driver has shown it may cause corrupted indexes, crashes or Access Violations when a FoxPro index is updated. Therefore, we recommend read only use of the FoxPro driver at this time. This applies to all versions of the BDE FoxPro driver."

Many alternatives are available for replacing BDE drivers, and we found this site: http://www.kylecordes.com/bag/index.html very handy as a guide for choosing a proper alternative.

A highly recommended product is the Advantage Database from Extended Systems

www.AdvantageDatabase.com It offers Advantage VCL TDataSet Descendent and Advantage Local/ Database Server. After extensive testing of the product we concluded that it is best suited for our this purpose. The Advantage products handle Foxpro and Clipper farmat database files efficiently, thier SQL C/S Engine may also use the same format for data files, which makes the product a good tool for migrating legacy databases in a gradual manor, which is in fact what is really needed for clients with

data accumulated over the past years via Foxpro, dBase or Clipper apps.

Another potential alternative is Apollo Database from Vista Software www.apollodatabase.com It

comes with a library that implements standard dBase & Clipper commands and functions and by far is

considered the easiest means for upgrading Clipper applications to the windows environment as well as

to implementing Client/Server technologies for legacy-built database apps.