Each of these database types was connected by a library commonly referred to as a “driver”. When Delphi was first launched in 1995, it shipped with a series of VCL components that wrapped up the “Borland Database Engine” (BDE for short), which was already a healthy set of connectors to various databases like Paradox, DBase, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and a few others (if you count ODBC – “Open DataBase Connectivity”, a Microsoft library that enabled vendors to write a connector to ODBC and have coders connect through that – you could have dozens or hundreds of possibilities). “Information,” on the other hand, I’m going to use to represent the stuff that we can put up in front of a user and have a reasonable chance of being understood. In this context, I’m going to use “data” to represent raw data, the kind of thing that might be useful to a program, but generally doesn’t mean anything to a human who doesn’t know the insides of the computer. It is also worth making a differentiation between “data” and “information”. Generally, we do this with databases – things like Oracle, MS SQL, MS Access, etc. Let’s get down to brass tacks on this first – what is data access? Put simply, “data access” means the ability of a program to read and write persistent information – info that will be kept (hopefully safely) while the program is turned off, and can be retrieved when turned on again, or when asked for by another program. This time around, we’re going to talk about one of the most common uses for programming tools in business environments – data access. Last time we talked Delphi, we talked a bit about frameworks and we built your first Delphi app, a “Hello World” for Windows.

Source code program database delphi