Using the Client Dataset in Two-Tiered Client/Server Applications

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Client-server based applications have a number of advantages over file-based applications. To make such an approach work, however, the client dataset requires a provider component. This article will introduce you to the dataset provider component.

Introduction

In the last two articles I have provided an overview of the client dataset class in Delphi and also demonstrated the procedure of creating an in-memory table, working with it and saving data to a flat file. File-based single-tiered architecture has many advantages which have been discussed in the last article, but this architecture has many disadvantages too.

One of the major drawbacks is that file-based applications are essentially for a single user and use files for data storage. These files can be easily overwritten by other users, making the application lose all data saved in it. Then they are platform specific and cannot be ported to other platform without rewriting the entire code. Further since data is stored in a file-system, working with a huge amount of data may degrade performance.

These and many other drawbacks of file-based applications make this approach useful in some circumstances only, while for the majority of database applications the client-server architecture is used. In order to communicate with a remote database server, the client dataset requires a provider component. This article will provide an introduction to the dataset provider component and focus on how to use it with the client dataset to create two-tier client-server applications. 

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