Is ADO faster than using the BDE?

[LucieLastic]

hi All

I've got a bit of a dilemma. My reporting part of my app has to do a lot of query-ing and number crunching before it writes the data to a table ready for the report.

A couple of the reports are horrendously slow (15mins) and I'm thinking of trying to implement the queries using ADO components. I've rewritten these reports 4 times now and can't get them quicker. I've put indexes on my database (SS7) and still no improvement. The problem is possible related to a bad DB design in this area, but it's not possible to change this now has system is live and contains a lot of data.

Is it worth me trying to implement the ADO components? Generally, are they significantly quicker ?

thanks
lou

 

[TealWren]

ADO Components might be faster for some databases, especially MS databases like MSSQL & Access but I don't think that the speed increase would be significant.

What DB are you using? Do you have a lot of subqueries? In my experience it's the subqueries that will kill you, speedwise.

 

[LucieLastic]

hi TealWren

I'm using SQL Server 7 and delphi 5. I have changed my BDE connection so it's using ODBC rather than the D5 driver. This seems to have improved it somewhat. I've also taken out half a dozen lookup fields I had in my query.

Since posting this, I have read (on the net) that BDE+ODBC appears to be a lot faster on reads than ADO (don't know about the updates though), as I'm more interested in the reading speed.

thanks for the reply
lou

 

[LucieLastic]

p.s. Got the report down to 4.5mins now (was 15 before).

 

[brettparkhurst]

I have not noticed much difference in speed using ADO vs. BDE but you may want to check the column indexes on the tables you are querying. You might find that by adding a couple of indexes in the correct columns you could significantly increase the processing time. The main benefit I see to using ADO is you do not have to support the BDE on clients.

Brett Parkhurst
brettparkhurst@uswest.net