Case Study

Apollo and FoxPro

Author: Scott Martin, Senior Programmer
Company: First Financial

I was introduced to Delphi as an alternative platform to develop Windows applications. In using Delphi, I was pleased with it's RAD capabilities but the BDE left much to be desired.

At the time, we were in the process of converting all over our applications to Visual FoxPro to maintain compatibility with existing FoxPro DOS applications. After being convinced of Delphi's power, we were still faced with the problem of maintaining our existing databases.

In our search, we discovered Apollo which provided everything needed to support our existing data structures. Another Apollo feature we were impressed with was that it was easy for us to convert our existing xBase code to Delphi because Apollo supported xBase commands.

Our final product, a large MRP system for our company, supported 50+ concurrent users. The fact that Apollo was able to support this type of heavy usage on our network was a testimonial to it's reliability in the field. In using Apollo over the past several years, I have been extremely impressed with it's speed and reliability. I have developed a wide variety of applications all using Apollo as the database engine and to this day, these systems all still in use and going strong.

It was a pleasant surprise when ApolloDB announced the release of Apollo Database Server (ADS) with SQL support because several of our customers were looking for this technology to support their existing applications. ADS allowed us to re-use all of our existing knowledge and source code as we moved to client/server.

It was a big relief that we didn't have to use a different tool. We have since developed several proprietary applications that take full advantage of ADS. These systems are in use around the world. With the increasing improvements in speed, reliability and new features, ApolloDB has created a superb product that we will continue to use well into the future.