Reply to post: Re: The problem with Delphi

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: The problem with Delphi

Interbase was never the SQL backend of choice. Interbase was mostly the red-headed stepchild Borland got when it bought Ashton-Tate (which got it too without understanding well what to do with it) to get dBase. A copy was present in most releases, but they never promoted it too much. It had some sever limitation that were fixed not long ago.

Yet in VB times, all you could ship for free with a VB application was the Jet Engine - SQL Embedded or whatever came only far later. Ironically Interbase had a small footprint which would have made it a far better embedded RDMBS.

Actually, the name Delphi was the project codename referring to Oracle ("Where do you go to talk to the Oracle? At Delphi!"), as Oracle was the main database target. Delphi database classes and controls had special support for many Oracle features, i.e. nested tables. It had good support for Sybase/SQL Server as well, plus DB2 and Informix, but I never used the latter two so I don't know how well they were supported. Just, later, when the BDE and its "SQL Drivers" were deprecated, Delphi was not able to deliver a well working replacement, and support for "new" databases like MySQL and Postgres wasn't comparable to the previous one, and it didn't help to make the product more popular too.

Anyway, the Delphi name stuck, and made marketing more difficult. Not many know well Greek history and mythology.... and still they could wonder what it has to do with Pascal.

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