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Guest · Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 8:11 am Post subject: Help with Database choice

Hi,

I am relatively new to delphi database programming, i do however have
a reasonable knowledge of database principals etc. The problem...

We currently have our proprietary Inspection software which records
data for the offshore oil industry. It records things like positional
data, user inputted data and geosurvey data, every second. There will
only ever be one or two machines that would be committing/retreiving
data from the database at once. The amount of data could escalate
quite quickly, with data captured every second for periods of up to
three months.

The software (not written by myself) currently uses a local paradox
database, and i am wanting to change to a different database. I have
built some smaller applications in delphi using an access database
through ADO, and i found this to be quite easy to learn and simple to
program. I understand that access has limited abilities, an although
it was fine with my smaller apps, I can see this becoming problematic
with more data.I have a feeling that using an access database for the
inspection software is going to be a hassle bacause i think that there
is a limit to the amount of data access can store.

The database would ideally be located on another 'local' machine,
however this is not a requirement ( it can be the same machine).

Someone has suggested to use Oracle as a database server (which we
have), however after looking at it for a few days, i am stuck and a
bit overwhelmed wioth the complexity of oracle. I had trouble even
connecting to the database.

I have done a bit of reading on thses groups and some people have
suggested MSSQL or Interbase for similar situations to mine. Interbase
i can see comes with delphi, and i would 'think' (any comments?) that
this would be quite similar to using access within delphi.

Anybody with relevant input is welcomed to post. If Oracle is going to
be too complicated to manage (there is going to be no support while
gathering data offshore) i need to consider other databases.

Any help greatly appreciated

Simon