At 02:38 PM 17-08-00 +0200, you wrote:

>Just for the sake of interest - I'm a very beginner:
>What are gdbs.

It's the usual suffix on an InterBase database, e.g. MyData.gdb. It's not
a requirement, just a convention. The DB engine doesn't care what you call
the database.

But...
It's good to follow the convention because, one your database gets up near
2 GB, you need to split it into multiple files. (That's an OS file size
limit on both Windows and Linux, not a database limit). If you follow the
convention, the secondary files can be 'gd1', 'gd2', etc. Again, it's just
a convention.

> And what is BDE?

Borland Database Engine. It's the connectivity layer to databases that is
used (by default) in the Borland database development tool
environments. It's about to be phased out - Delphi 6 (for Linux and
Windows) is coming out with a new, much lighter database layer called dbDirect.

There are better connectivity options for InterBase than the BDE,
though. But BDE is still handy when you want to pump data between unlike
databases. It connects to just about anything on Windows with varying
degrees of effectiveness - works best with desktop databases, works not at
all with Linux. Quite a number of DBMSs have native drivers that connect
to the BDE (InterBase, M$SQL, Oracle, Access, Paradox, etc.) - others
connect to it via a BDE-aware ODBC driver.

DBDirect (the BDE replacement) is supposed to be able to connect to Linux
or Win32 drivers for a large number of DBs, including PG and MySQL (or
should that be MaxSQL now?)

A lengthy reply - it'll store in the archive for next time we get that
question. :))

Helen


http://www.interbase2000.org
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"Ask not what your free, open-source database can do for you,
but what you can do for your free, open-source database."
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