Databases

Work in progress..

Introduction

This page is about creating databases applications with Lazarus using the DB-unit. In the DB unit all the basic functionality for working with databases is implemented, but to be usefull they need components which are dependent on the database you want to use.

The first part gives a short introduction on the several database-dependent components and how to install them, the second part is a short course in working with the DB-unit and the last part gives specific information about several supported databases.

First Part: General information about supported databases

Introduction

The databases you can use with Lazarus, (actually with FPC, but that's not so important for the rest of the story) can be divided into two categories: The databases which are completely 'internal' and are written in Freepascal, and the 'external' databases to which connections are made with client-libraries. To use these client-libraries the appropiate bindings must be available. Most client-libraries come only with bindings for C, but FPC provides several packages with the pascal-bindings for database-clients. The supported databases are listed in table 1. (fpc 1.9.7 and above)

Table 1

Database	Package name	Need Client Lib?	Supported versions	Supported platforms
DBase	tDbf	No		All
In memory	memds	No		All
Textfiles	sdf	No		All
Interbase	IBase	Yes	4-6	i386: Linux, Win32
Firebird	IBase	Yes	1-1.5	i386: Linux, Win32
SQLite	SQLite	Yes
PostgreSQL	postgres	Yes	6.6-8	i386: Linux, Win32
Oracle	Oracle	Yes
ODBC	ODBC	Yes		i386: Win32
MySQL	MySQL	Yes	3, 4.0	i386: Linux, Win32