Creating a database: techniques and existing solutions

This article describes a process that programmers call just "creating a database". We will explain that it is rather tedious. Better, of course, people who do not have free time, do not go to these "wilds". It is much easier to entrust this occupation to a professional. It's good that today the Internet is full of similar announcements. For example, there is a network of freelance exchanges or a similar specialist you can easily find on any exchange of articles. To do this, you need to apply for the creation of such a program as a regular article, describing the necessary task.

What is the creation of a database? There are two types of database: desktop and client-server. To create a desktop database, you need a program such as Access. You can easily find it in any office suite. Now Access is released by Infra-Office, Microsoft and many other creators of office packages. As for the client-server model, the unpretentious model can be implemented by the "learning" program Delphi. Serious databases are now written on Oracle and Visual Fox Pro. These software platforms are equipped with graphical tools for creating processed queries to databases of 500,000 and 1,000,000 or tens of millions of lines.

Consider the most promising platform for programming past years Delphi 6.0. We will make a reservation right away that creating a database in Delphi is not just getting * .db or * bdb files, but installing it on a personal computer, setting up and automating it. So, Delphi 6.0 creates database files in the subroutine, located in the main menu of the development environment, Date Base Desktop 6.0.

Here you will find all the necessary tools for creating database files, assigning its type and pre-populating. Note that you will be able to create and operate only those files for which a driver is installed on the platform. For example, to work with the type of Visual Fox Pro 9.0, you need to install an external driver into the operating system.

As for the operation of the program with the database created on Delphi 6.0, without its co-existence with the platform itself, this problem is solved by installing and configuring the Data Base Engine 6.0 (BDE).

So, if you have decided to work with the Paradox file type, then by writing the program in a specific folder on the hard disk, you need to subsequently write the settings in the Data Base Engine 6.0 package, which includes file paths, their properties and the database name. This scheme works when you move the programs you create to another computer.

The Data Base Engine 6.0 package must be installed on the computer where you install the machine code created on Delphi 6.0.

Creating a database on Delphi 6.0 is quite automated. An elementary program for storing data with a single database file is obtained by several keystrokes. Here the main difficulty lies in the implementation of relational forms of the database. So SDNF 3 can be realized by setting up two DBGRID tables. And getting various kinds of reports in QReport is a whole story that you do not even want to touch upon. Let's just say that it's better not to throw the code of the created program into the trash, since every user's report for people who do not know SQL will have to be programmed anew ...

Access database creation in the office suite is not difficult. Entering the program, you get access to the necessary tools for creating or editing an existing database. Here you do not need to make special efforts to create a report or a new form of the project. Everything is solved almost intuitively. So, to establish communication between tables, a graphical toolkit is used, which, in almost one touch, can link two necessary tables to the required key.

In this article, only the creation of a database on training and desktop packages is considered. As for serious programming, without knowing about the existence of these platforms, you will never solve the problem of operating large databases.