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March 7, 2000
Well, you might want to think again.
We visited the Inprise website and read the following statement.
"The Borland Database Engine is the solution for Windows developers demanding easy access to local and remote data--regardless of format or platform."
A very strong and convincing statement. A call to pre-sales confirmed that the combination of Delphi 4 and Paradox tables would work fine for our application, so we made the purchase and went to work. Approximately one year later our application went into beta. It appeared to work well, and people were happy with it. Along with this main application, we also wrote several smaller applications, one of whose job was to take between 5 and 8 thousand 6 second phone calls each day, record the incoming data and issue a confirmation code to the caller.
Then came the error ... Index out of date. We researched the Inprise web site thoroughly. Inprise addresses the error at http://www.nanmckay.com/software/support/inprise/ti3342.html where they list the causes and cures. We printed all the documentation that we could find and read all the information that was being furnished by other users on other sites. We even made that famous tech support call. Have your credit card ready because it costs $225.00 just to get past the automated phone menu.
The end result is that if you are going to network your application, this is an error that you might as well get used to seeing. The more users accessing the data, the more prevalent the error. And Inprise knows it too. So the question is, why weren't we told about it in the beginning?
Perhaps it is because if they told you of the problems you were about to encounter you wouldn't buy the product? I know that if pre-sales told me that I could count on my product (and my company) looking foolish because our software wouldn't be able to keep an accurate index, I wouldn't buy it.
Nobody would.
Inprise states that this error cannot be caused programmatically, and lists 7 known reasons for this error to occur. We have tried all their suggested fixes on every networked installation that we have made. The bottom line…
It doesn't work.
So if the problem isn't programmatic and the application will not run (without an index error) on any network found so far, then the problem must be hidden deeper, perhaps in the BDE itself.
And what is Inprise's solution to the problem? The Inprise site states that Borland recommends using a Client Server database, or if you are using Windows NT as your server, switching to Novell Netware or Windows 95.
Well the Client Server idea might work, we haven't tried it and I doubt we will. The idea of buying another thousand dollars worth of their software each time I want to distribute my $495.00 program, just doesn't sit well.
And the idea of telling our clients that they need to change their current server just to accommodate our software, doesn't sound to realistic either. It would only prove to be an exercise in futility anyhow as we have experienced this index problem on all the above mentioned operating systems.
OK, so where does this leave us? Well, after countless hours of tweaking the BDE, searching the workgroups, and testing different network settings on numerous platforms, we have come to the conclusion that we will have to re-write our application using something different than the products we first chose.
We revamped the smaller application using Apollo ( a BDE replacement that uses Foxpro tables and index's ) and the index problems miraculously disappeared. We are currently in the process of replacing the BDE and the Paradox Tables in our larger application with this same product and preliminary testing is indicating success.
Using the Delphi, Paradox and BDE combination has damaged our company's credibility and has seriously delayed our development schedule. The financial impact has not been calculated at this time but it isn't going to be pretty.
If you are preparing to develop a multi-user database application using Delphi 4, Paradox tables and the BDE, you may want to reconsider your choice of tools. To continue development with this combination of products will almost assuredly gain you membership to an undesired club.
A club that we unfortunately are already members of.
James Allen
eft@thecenter.zzn.com
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