[Lazarus] More explorations with tiOPF

[Andreas Berger]

Hi Graeme,

I'm not trying to say that SQLite is better than Firebird. In fact I use 
FB for larger database usage. What I was trying to say is that SQLite 
has it's place and worth. I replied due to you thinking that SQLite was 
half-baked and Michael saying that it is sloppy. I'm not trying to 
flame, only present my view since I know that SQLite could be usefull to 
pp out there.

Now to the issue of speed. We had a program that was written in DOS that 
kept a record of all occurances in the customers equipment. I used a 
homemade DB that recorded around 20K records per day. Last year we 
upgraded part of the program to Windows and the DB was part of the 
upgrade. I used firebird at first. When the program started the first 
time at a client, it would convert the last 24 months worth of data. It 
was taking around 80 minutes to convert one month. Before the project 
was finished a decision was made to use SQLite. After converting we 
discovered that the conversion of the DB took only around 50 minutes 
with SQLite. I have made no query tests. This was purely writing to the 
DB. By the way, the DB has 6 tables and 4 of the tables 8 indexes. 
Querying is and was blazing fast in both DB's, I never compared.

>> - SQLite is easier to use. It's especially nice to be able to deploy
>> your app and easily create the DB at run-time.
>
> We do this too (deployment and run-time creation) with Firebird - no 
> problems at all.
Hmm, maybe I haven't researched enough. I can create tables, but never 
managed to create the DB. Maybe it has to do with Zeos that throws an 
exception when I enable it without having a valid firbird DB. But I 
would like to know how to do this
>
>
>> - SQLite is made for SINGLE application access. So my pascal program
>> will always read/write the expected types.
>
> The same database application can easily switch between Firebird 
> Embedded and Firebird RDBMS - thus you have a great upgrade path to a 
> full blown multi-user system, if you application becomes more popular 
> and needs to scale upwards.
True, and for this and many other things firebird is far superior. But 
often I don't have the need for this.
>
>
>> - Firebird embedded does not work in virtual machines when the DB is on
>> a network mapped drive. I have tested VMWare, Virtual Box and Virtual
> > PC. (This can also be a plus since I use this fact to inhibit one of 
> > my apps to be run from a virtual box.)
>
> I can't comment on this, but I can't see why not, if you for example 
> under Windows map the network share to a permanent drive letter. We 
> have done this with MS Access (.mdb database) for years. And MS Access 
> is a local database only system too. The other point being, if you 
> database needs to live on a remote location, why not simply switch to 
> Firebird RDBMS server - get the full multi-user treatment for free.
>
Already answered by someone else. Rats, there goes my virtual machine test.
>
>> - SQLite can be embedded without needing to distribute a DLL. (Although
>> I no longer use this feature)
>
> I'd rather go with too much features (though I don't see why this is a 
> problem, just don't use those features), and a database that keeps 
> your data (integrity) in check.
Data integrity is not an issue. SQLite has no problems there. They are 
simply not orthodox and you can (if you want to) access a number field 
as text or try to access a text field as an integer. But you don't have to.

Andreas