TDBF works like a charm

Took two minutes to check out TDBF, the free open-source embedded database for Delphi (out of many). Discovered that it actually ships with Lazarus. I did a clean install of Lazarus/FPC on one of my mac’s at work (old macbook) just for fun – and you will find it pre-installed in the database tab.

Right. To get it working all you need to do is the following:

 

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
   x:     Integer;
   mstart: TDateTime;
   mField: TField;
begin

  dbx.FilePath:=getMyDocsPath;
  dbx.CreateTable;
  dbx.Open;

  mStart:=now;
  mField:=dbx.fieldByname('name');
  for x:=1 to 100000 do
  begin
    dbx.Append;
    mField.AsString:='Name #' + IntToStr(x);
    dbx.post;
  end;

  caption:='Time:' + TimeToStr(now-mStart);

  dbx.First;
  listbox1.items.BeginUpdate;

  repeat
  listbox1.items.Add(dbx.fieldByName('name').asString);
    dbx.Next;
    if listbox1.items.count>100 then
    break;
  until dbx.EOF;
  listbox1.items.EndUpdate;

end;

That code will create a new database (remember to add ID and Name fields to the field-def collection property of the component).

The function getMyDocsPath looks like this:

function getMyDocsPath:String;
Begin
  result:='/Users/' + getCurrentUser + '/Documents/';
end;      

Note: The above code is for Unix (OS X) only, but should be trivial to figure out for Windows or Linux.

Speed

Well I only tested it on my ancient mac, but I was able to stuff 100.000 records into the flat-file in 16 seconds. This includes (as you can see above) a post for each insert. The time should be a lot better by caching, say, 1000 records in memory before commiting the data to disk.

Either way — TDBF is a great little database if you have a small project, or even if you just want to store options and/or user-data like they do in dot net.

Check out the code from sourceforge here: http://tdbf.sourceforge.net/