Simon,
We have used Access extensively with Delphi and have found that you are
better off to purchase one of the third party packages rather than use it
natively thru Delphi (performance is greatly improved). Access is widely
accepted for single or a small number of users.
We have used Opus DirectAccess and ODBC98.
While ODBC98 is great and you don't require any special DLL's, it doesn't
support all table and query functions which limits it. If it's simple
editing and querying facility then this is the way to go. It is very fast
and simply requires an ODBC data source to be set up (can be automated) on
the client PC's.
Opus DirectAccess is also very good and very fast, and you also have full
DAO programmability (is that a word?) which means you can incorporate your
own routines to compact the database etc. However, it requires a DLL to be
installed and some registry entries on each client - which of course can be
part of an installation program. In effect, ODA bypasses the BDE so you have
to switch back and forth between projects which is a bit of a pain. But it
is blisteringly fast even over a network compared to say Oracle.
One thing that you must be aware with Access (and I believe SQL Server) is
that they do page-locking, not record-locking. This caused no end of
problems for us with an application where we had several users (it seemed to
be a problem with more than 10) doing multiple inserts per second, to the
point where everybody hung. We had to shuffle record sizes to get around it
but have never successfully got rid of the problem. Note this is with a
number of users doing a large number of table inserts per second.
All in all Access 97 is pretty robust. We have a number of applications out
there using it in the last two years and have had no corruption issues.
Compacting is required often otherwise it bloats out but this can be built
in as part of a weekly or monthly housekeeping routine.
Hope this helps,
Regards,
Laurence Bevan
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