Databases & Dolphin

Anyone has any experience with ODBC/databases and Dolphin ?  How easy to
use is it compared to say VAST or VW?  Did you experience any
problem/surprise with MS-Access, Oracle, DB2 or MySQL ?  Do you know of
any OODBMS that works with Dolphin?

The ODBC package doesn't seem to be included in the evaluation version
so it's a bit hard to "evaluate" the database connectivity kit...

Any comment/experience/facts/etc welcome!

Thanks.

Benoit St-Jean wrote:
You might want to have a look at Restore:

   http://www.solutionsoft.co.uk/restore/main.htm

or if you aren't wedded to ODBC, Omnibase may be of interest:

   http://www.gorisek.com/homepage/index.html

-------------------------
Antony Blakey
mailto:[hidden email]
Linkuistics Pty Ltd
Adelaide, South Australia

Antony Blakey wrote:

> You might want to have a look at Restore:
>
>    http://www.solutionsoft.co.uk/restore/main.htm
>

...which is a convenient point to note that a version of ReStore for Dolphin
5 will be available shortly. This will in fact be version 1.11 of ReStore,
with a small number of enhancements and fixes.

Existing ReStore users can email me direct to request the current beta.
There's also a one-month trial version available.

Benoit:

> The ODBC package doesn't seem to be included in the evaluation version
> so it's a bit hard to "evaluate" the database connectivity kit...

Are you trialing the Pro version of Dolphin? This should include the
Database Connection package (and so can be used with the trial version of
ReStore), although if memory serves the source may be hidden.

Best regards,

John Aspinall
Solutions Software
ReStore: http://www.solutionsoft.co.uk/restore
Tools+: http://www.solutionsoft.co.uk/toolsplus

Benoit,

> The ODBC package doesn't seem to be included in the evaluation version
> so it's a bit hard to "evaluate" the database connectivity kit...

Why do you say this? The ODBC connectivity *is* in the trial version of
Dolphin but you must have the Standard or Professional edition. All the
functionality is there but the source is not provided. Look for a
DBConnection class.

Best Regards,

Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
http://www.object-arts.com
---
Are you trying too hard?
http://www.object-arts.com/Relax.htm
---

Oups!  Sorry guys, my mistake...

Andy Bower wrote:

Benoit,

The ODBC package doesn't seem to be included in the evaluation version
so it's a bit hard to "evaluate" the database connectivity kit...

Why do you say this? The ODBC connectivity *is* in the trial version of
Dolphin but you must have the Standard or Professional edition. All the
functionality is there but the source is not provided. Look for a
DBConnection class.

Benoit St-Jean <[hidden email]> writes:

I use Dolphin's ODBC connectivity with MS SQL Server quite
extensively in a production environment and have experienced no
problems at all.  I highly recommend it.

--

Daryl Richter
Lead Programmer, Exelon Power Team

http://www.exeloncorp.com/powerteam

Benoit St-Jean <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
> Anyone has any experience with ODBC/databases and Dolphin ?  How easy to
> use is it compared to say VAST or VW?  Did you experience any
> problem/surprise with MS-Access, Oracle, DB2 or MySQL ?  Do you know of
> any OODBMS that works with Dolphin?

I have not done DB stuff in VAST in quite a while (version 4) so I don't
know how valid my experience is.  It seemed a bit complex to me at the time.
I suppose this complexity served to better provide for portability on
different OS's.  It also seemed to support a lot of database systems and
features that I never needed.  I used the VisualAge GUI thing to do some DB
user interfaces.  I guess it was nice having something like a data bound
control.  I just did not like all those visual lines (it was like connect
the dots), and there was a bit of learning involved in all that.

The Dolphin DB support seems less complicated than VASTs, it is a little
closer to the Windows API's.  DB support in Dolphin is not integrated into
the View Composer so the programmer is more responsible from displaying and
saving records.  When I first did DB stuff in Dolphin there was only ODBC.
It felt a bit more primitive than DAO.  I found that in order to get
anywhere near decent speed on heavily used queries I had to precompile them.
Precompiling the queries was a bit of a pain as it became an extra design
consideration, but it made them fast.  Updating records is also more of a
pain with ODBC as you have to use update queries which may have to be
precompiled for speed depending upon how you use them.  ODBC is usable, it
just requires a little more design consideration.  Dolphin 5 includes a
wrapper for ADO, which I think would be easier to use for many DB tasks.

When I had to develop an application that made fairly heavy use of database
I wanted to develop a database framework to make my life easier.
Fortunately I did not have to do that, as Solutions Software released
ReStore http://www.solutionsoft.co.uk/restore/index.htm .  It uses ODBC to
persist objects into a relational database.  It is fairly easy to use, and
has freed me from designing around the database so I can focus on objects.
It works well if you can create the database.

If you just want to do a little quick DB stuff or interface with an existing
DB structure than ADO might be the way to go in D5.

David Gorisek has an object database called OmniBase
 http://www.gorisek.com/    I think this is his site, but I can't get to it
now).  I have not directly used it, but his Source Tracking System (which I
use for source control) uses it under the hood.

You can read more about ODBC in Dolphin here
http://www.object-arts.com/Lib/EducationCentre4/htm/databaseconnectivity.htm
, most of this still applies to D5 (the D5 Education Center is not available
yet).  You can learn more about ADO in general here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ado270/htm/
dasdkadooverview.asp?frame=true .

I have used ODBC in Dolphin 4 with MS Access 97, 2000, and Sybase SQL
Anywhere.  I only experienced minor problems with SQL Anywhere.  It was
returning a guess about the size of a query as a negative number, which
Dolphin did not like.  I was able to work around that issue.

Chris