The Borland DBExpress technology is a set of data access classes designed specifically for ensuring high performance access to data using a common API. High performance is achieved through limiting the functionality available through the DBExpress driver. There very few classes (5), and result sets are read-only and limited to forward only scrolling. Enhanced functionality (eg. scrolling and updates) is available through other built in data handling classes such as DataSetProvider and ClientDataSets. The following paper describes how the Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) DBExpress driver can be installed in order to provide high performance access to your ASA database through Delphi.

Note: The DBExpress driver is a technology owned and supported by Borland.

Installation

The following steps describe how to manually install the Adaptive Server Anywhere dbexpress driver.

1. Download the file dbexpasa.zip and extract its contents into a temporary directory.  This ZIP file contains the ASA DBExpress driver (dbexpasa.dll).
2. Copy dbexpasa.dll into your Borland\Delphi7\bin or Octane\bin directory
3. Add the following line to “Borland Shared\dbexpress\dbxdrivers.ini” under the [Installed Drivers] section:

ASA=1

4. Add the following section to “Borland Shared\dbexpress\dbxdrivers.ini” to install the driver:

[ASA]
GetDriverFunc=getSQLDriverASA
LibraryName=dbexpasa.dll
VendorLib=dbodbc8.dll
BlobSize=-1
DataBase=Database Name
ErrorResourceFile=./DbxMSSErr.msg
HostName=ServerName
LocaleCode=0000
ASA TransIsolation=ReadCommited
Password=password
User_Name=user
OS Authentication=False

5. Add a section similar to the following to your “Borland Shared\dbexpress\dbxconnections.ini” file to create connection profiles

[ASALocal]
DriverName=ASA
DataBase=ASA 8.0 Sample
HostName=
ASA TransIsolation=ReadCommited
Password=sql
User_Name=dba
ErrorResourceFile=./DbxMSSErr.msg
LocaleCode=0000
BlobSize=-1
OS Authentication=False

***Note: The above instructions refer to installing the DBExpress driver for use with ASA version 8. To use the driver with version 9, simply replace the ‘VendorLib’ entry in dbxdrivers.ini with ‘dbodbc9.dll’.