Question:
Many companies offer Borland Database Engine replacements claiming to be smaller and faster. What does the BDE offer that these replacements don’t? Is there a good reason to keep the BDE?
Answer:
Yeah, the BDE is big, and it adds two extra floppies to an install. But there are things inherent to the BDE that are incredibly powerful, and most of all, very convenient.I’ve looked at several of the “BDE Replacements” out there, and what they don’t really talk about are the things that they DON’T support that the BDE does. For example, many of them don’t fully support ANSI SQL92, which means you can’t do things like subqueries (incredibly necessary for doing two-table updates). Some of them have file size limitations (most only support up to 4K block sizes in tables), and that means forget about creating tables with millions of records in them. Others don’t do BLOBs very well. In other words there are tradeoffs. So what you have to do is evaluate the various packages to see which one(s) fit your particular needs.
However, in their defense, I’ll say that they’re great replacements for real simple database applications that won’t have big tables. For instance, a PIM comes to mind where the table sizes will be measured more in the hundreds of records as opposed to thousands.
