I am very interested in this topic too. I like Paradox for its speed and
easy to management with Delphi but it is not so stable for big tables. When
a secondary index is marked "maintained", it often get into trouble after we
update some values in this index (B Tree trouble) and we have to re-generate
the index. (It will cause big problem when some application rely on it).

Is there any better database free with Delphi?

"Bill Todd (TeamB)" <b...@dbginc.com> wrote in message
news:8p72aj$il12@bornews.borland.com...

Interbase 6. You can download it from www.inprise.com/interbase .

--
Bill Todd (TeamB)
(Questions received via email cannot be answered.)

Thanks.

What I am doing is collecting some information so I need insert a large
number of records to some simple tables. I found Interbase much slower than
Paradox when inserting records. However, I didn't test my program thoroughly
with Interbase.
Is there any way to make the Paradox table more stable?  I used a long
string field (URL, char 200) as the key field since I do not want repeated
value in my table. I often met the "BTree" problem even my program shutdown
normally.(When the program shutdown abnormally, the table is surely to
crash.)

--
Chinainfo DB Group
http://www.chinainfo.org

"Bill Todd (TeamB)" <b...@dbginc.com> wrote in message
news:8qb7mu$q5t2@bornews.borland.com...

We have been using Paradox for 5 years and have some clients with huge
files.
250 million records with a few indexes.

What we have learned is:
1 - Always close tables in code.
2 - Flush tables before closing.
3 - Use a simple Primary Key - a 32 bit integer (not autoincrement)
      this reduces the size of secondary indexes as every entry in a
secondary
      index table must contain the primary key value.

Since paradox keeps data in Primary Key order you don't want to change the
value of the primary key as it forces the data to reorder itself.

We have mission critical apps and very rarely have index troubles.

Garry Kernan