Up to this point, the database platform for Camelot has been MS Access. While it has its strong points, Access also has its limitations. Because of this, and the fact that many of our clients were pushing the limits of Access, we've been in the process of migrating to a true client/server database architecture. That migration is now complete with the release of Camelot 3.0.
So what that means is:
1. NO MORE DAO ERRORS! One of the limitations of Access is that it is not a true transaction based database. So when one user accesses a record, especially if that record contains memo or blob fields, it would not actually just be that record that gets locked, but possibly a group of records. This would create conflicts when those close records were modified by users, and thus sometimes, a DAO Error would occur which caused some data in memo fields to be lost. The NEW database platform is a truly transaction based record locking architecture, which provides many stability advantages.
2. Licensing is now based on CONCURRENT users. So that means if you have 5 computers in your office, but you only really have 3 people using the software, then you only need 3 user licenses. Though this was technically the case with prior versions of the software, you still needed authorization on all 5 computers, so it created registration problems if you did not purchase all 5 licenses. That's no longer an issue with this new release since the server maintains the logged in users and registration information.
3. There's no practical limit on the number of users that can be logged into your database. In Access, once you got more than 10 or so users, the system would often become bogged down and have more DAO errors. 100 users is not a problem at all with the new version.
4. There's no practical database file size limit. While no one was ever really pushing the actual limits of an Access MDB file size before, it was still a problem for that platform when the db file size grew to over 250 megabytes. Again, that is just not a problem at all on the new platform.
5. Compact/Repair is no longer necessary. There is a utility called "sweep" that does a similar operation in the new platform, but you do not have to close all users out to perform the sweep, and it is much faster than the compact/repair was in Access.
As time goes on, we will continue to update this topic to talk about all of the specific improvements that are just because of this database platform change.
keywords: database, database platform, firebird, access
Add to favorites