Books : Mastering Borland Delphi 2005: Update for Delphi 2006

Mastering Delphi Update for Delphi 2006

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Chapter 16

Delphi 2006 BDP Extensions

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If the features related to the .NET framework libraries (FCL) have not changed, waiting for Delphi support for .NET 2.0, Borland specific libraries like the Borland Data Provider for ADO.NET have seen relevant improvements.

The most relevant new capability of the BDP library is the introduction of connection pooling support. This means you can now place in a single application multiple BDP connection components and configure them so that they share a single physical connection to the database (or a limited set of connections in case of a multi-threaded application). This way you reduce the number of connect and disconnect operation being performed against the RDBMS server. This features is not really relevant in a WinForms (or VCL.NET) application, while it represents a very nice improvement for ASP.NET applications.

The options related with connection pooling are available in the connections editor dialog box, as you can see in the following screen shot:

Another nice feature is the support for tracing of the SQL statements that are sent to the database, just as it happens for dbExpress and other Delphi database architectures. The BdpConnection component has a new Tracing event that sends you some data about the operation just performed. This event is enabled only if you set up the connection with the Tracing parameter set to True (the default is False).

There is also a new default dialog box you can present to users to let them manage database update conflicts with the BDP components, like it happens fort the traditional DataSetProvider and the ClientDataset component.

Moreover, there is support for MySQL 4.0.24; you can customize the data fields mapping when you use the data migration wizard; there is support for some of the extended Oracle 9i data types (timestamps and similar). There are also new BDP drivers, as this table summarizes: