Finally the day has come, Embarcadero acquired AnyDAC and there is a lot to talk about, early last year I invested a lot of time evaluating AnyDAC and know you know why 
– I was very impressive with the amount of features, AnyDAC is everything dbExpress tried to be and never reached.
The reason I say that it’s because AnyDAC really allows developers to target multiples database without the workarounds required by dbExpress, like: Field Mapping when you persist the TFields. For long time AnyDAC allowed developers that use Delphi/C++Builder Professional edition to connect their application to Enterprise databases like Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix and others, something that was only possible through Enterprise and Architect edition, and much more.
Beyond that, there is a lot of specific database features supported by AnyDAC, which I consider very helpful in any database development, here some examples per database:
- For all databases
- Automatic Connection Recovery
- Unified DB Events Support
- Simplified architecture, it means no more Query + ClientDataSet + Provider just for a bi-directional cursor
- Much better performance when compared with dbExpress
- TADMemTable – in memory dataset, faster than TClientDataSet
- Much easier to migrate BDE applications to AnyDAC than the traditional dbExpress architecture
- Oracle
- SELECT FOR UPDATE clause – no more workaround doing UPDATE just to lock the record
- Query execution aborting – we always need that right?
- ROWID columns for fast data editing and refreshing
- RETURNING clause for fast data refreshing – no more select after the update to get a new value generated by trigger
- and more…
- Firebird
- RETURNING clause for fast data refreshing
- Trusted authentication
- DB services – backup, restore, validate, security, etc
- Query execution aborting
- PostgreSQL
- Yep, now you can connect natively with PostgreSQL
- and more…
- SQL Server
- Batch commands with multiple result sets – Now you can use that and improve your app performance
- Query execution aborting
- and more…
- MySQL
- AUTO_INCREMENT columns and retrieving of last inserted value.
- Drivers for several databases on Windows, Mac and iOS
This is a small list of interesting things on AnyDAC, you can find more here.
AnyDAC is a step forward and worth the effort to migrate from dbExpress to AnyDAC, there are lot of feature needed by Delphi and C++Builder developers, many of these features has been requested for a long time and you will have when using AnyDAC.
You may ask what is going to happen with dbExpress? BDE is dead, but still around , dbExpress is not dead and I don’t think will die soon, but there is no reason to keep two database access technology since AnyDAC is way better than dbExpress.
AnyDAC trial is available for download here.
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Andreano Lanusse | Technology and Software Development
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