Delphi and dbExpress... question...

[techgnome]

OK, so I've just discovered that Embarcadero offers a Delphi Starter Edition (http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter) that's similar to Microsoft's Express offering... although the licencing on it is a little whacked... you can use the SE until your annual revenue from products produced by it exceed $1000 ... I'm guessing it's on the honor system, as I don't see anything in the website that says just how that works.

Anyways, of course as part of the marketing campaign, it tries to up-sell you on the next level up, the Professional edition... some of the features of Pro are nice... but one stood out... according to the Starter Edition FAQ (http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter-faq) with the Professional Edition comes dbExpress local database connectivity to MySQL
Okaaaay... so what does that mean? Does that mean with the Starter Edition I DON'T get connectivity to local MySQL Databases? Or what? Naturally searching their website for "dbexpress" turns up a lot of useless results that I couldn't make heads or tails out of.

So I'm hoping someone here can explain to me just what that means. If I can't use the SE to talk to a MySQL database, I'm going to pass and revert back to .NET... but I have the perfect opportunity project to give something new a try (although it will be going back to my roots as my first real development was with Pascal). But it's only viable if I can talk to a database. Or is dbExpress kind of like the Data Explorer in VS? A tool that makes connections and data access simplier? If I can code it manually, then there isn't an issue.

-tg

[esposito]

I'm using Delphi 2005 Personal, a free edition of Delphi which allows you to legally develop commercial applications.

Unfortunately, the only two editions available are in French and German.

The only limitation it has is that you can't use third-party controls. Nevertheless, you can have access to them through code.

The type of database I use with Delphi is SQLITE. You can find its specifications here:

http://sqlite.org/

If you need additional information, feel free to ask me.

[esposito]

By the way, if you like Pascal, I suggest taking a look at Lazarus, which is completely free:

http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

[techgnome]

Thanks... yeah, I found out a couple days after posting this that the SE version isn't free after all, but requires the shelling out of about $200.... sigh... if I was planning on making it my primary language and doing heavy development in it, that might work... but since I just want to tinker, I have other places where I'd rather use that $200 (like my truck).

But Lazarus looks interesting... hopefully later I'll get the chance to take it for a spin.

-tg