Pervasive OLE/DB Driver

[johnCronin]

Does anyone have experience with an OLE/DB driver for pervasive. The driver is available from Pervasive as part of the SDK download but not a stand alone download. When I spoke with Pervasive support they recommended not using the OLE/DB driver and to continue using the ODBC driver.

The reason I would prefer to use OLE/DB is to allow software developed in .Net to work in either the SQL or Pervasive environment with only a connection string change.

 

[MacolaHelp]

Have you tried researching the datadirect drivers? We often used them for third party apps that integrated with macola rather than the pervasive odbc drivers. They have trial downloads of their products at their website. Did you post your question about the ole/db drivers on the pervasive sql forum? There are several knowledgeable programmers on that forum that can probably tell you whether or not the pervasive drivers will do what you want.

 

[stravis]

My personal opinion is to take everthing on the Pervasive forum with a grain of salt. It is controlled by Pervasive zealots that are unwilling to allow any real discussion of the limitations of the Pervasive development platform to be discussed. I tend to be fairly optimistic about software products but also realistic and I have had at least two of my realistic and truthful contributions to that forum censored due to comments that cast Pervasive products in a somewhat damaging, but in my opinion, truthful light.

That said; I have used the Pervasive OLEDB drivers and I have found them to be mostly reliable. The Pervasive OLEDB drivers use the Pervasive ODBC drivers for SQL queries and the Pervasive Transactional Engine for all DML (Database Manipulation Language) operations. The only trick is to make sure that you do not use JOIN operations in your SQL queries, instead use WHERE conditions to perform your "JOIN" conditions. You must make sure that your WHERE condition "JOIN" are based on existing indexes within the database. For example you should link on both the "item_no" and the "item_filler" field, not just the "item_no" field.

If you decide to use the ODBC drivers please be aware that while the data may be retrieved more reliably writing data back is not nearly as reliable, becuase many of the more obscure Macola data files have incorrect DDF table definitions. These incorrect entries cause data written to the btrieve data files to be written incorrectly.

Scott Travis
infoSpring, LLC.

 

[johnCronin]

Scott,

Thanks for your response. It is scary to think that a company who is in business to provide data access can't produce a reliable state of the art method to access their data engine.

John Cronin

 

[vbajock]

If your going to use .net you better really consider if you want to stay on Btrieve. It takes on or two lines of code to tie a .net program into an MSSQL db suing the .net native .SqlClient. All these OLE DB and ODBC solutions are COM retrofits that require all kinds of wrapper classes that are buggy as hell at this point, never mind the performance issues. MS is not going to see a lot of sense in putting a lot of work into making sure Pervasive's stuff runs right, and Pervasive is getting increasingly left behind. Changing backends isn't that big a deal anymore.