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Posted June 7, 2000
Its been 4 months since we dumped the BDE and Paradox in favor of Apollo and FoxPro tables and index's.
Here are the results.
very slight degradation in speed when opening tables but all of our index problems went away.
Before the conversion, our host application would have to be re-indexed daily. Since Apollo we've never had to re-index it.
Our other products have also stabilized and our index problems have become a thing of the past.
Apollo doesn't currently support SQL, so you will have to find other methods of gathering the necessary data. Removing the SQL from our program was a tedious job but we found that reports that heavily utilized SQL, are now running significantly faster.
You will loose a some useful field types when changing from Paradox to FoxPro, but I believe that once you find work-a-rounds for the losses you will find the stability to be well worth the effort.
It took several months of sifting through thousands of lines of code to make the conversion. This work is obviously frustrating as you are constantly reminded that you have already been here once before, and that you shouldn't have to be doing this again because of somebody else's product. The ensuing debugging then took several more weeks.
We have spent countless hours on the phone supporting our clients in an effort to keep the old program running while the conversion and bug swatting was taking place. Now that it is behind us, I can wholeheartedly say that being free of the BDE and Paradox has improved our product 500 percent. What was a completely unstable product has become a solid, dependable piece of software. I can also say that we have a very poor opinion of Borland / Inprise, and the thought of seeking compensation crosses our mind on a daily basis.
So what was the final cost of our fateful decision to use the Delphi, BDE and Paradox combination? Who knows. Who can put a price on lost income due to late market entry, months of additional programming and lost credibility?
In conclusion let me say that I have talked with programmers have never gotten this error. Perhaps they aren't opening the magic number of tables at that magic moment in time, I don't know. But one thing I know for sure, if your getting this error, its unlikely that it is going to go away without some major changes. Save the $225.00 phone call to Inprise because they're going to act like this is something they've never heard of before and insist that you must have your network or the BDE configured incorrectly. Considering the number of configurations available between numerous workstations accessing an NT server, you can spend a lot of time and money in your quest. When all this fails, and it will, they'll suggest that a possible workaround to the problem might be to re-index your files everyday. Hardly an acceptable solution.
If you are currently looking for a solution to the "Index out of date" problem, I wholeheartedly recommend Apollo. Its implementation into your existing application may or may not be feasible, and it may not be for everybody, but has certainly worked for us.
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