Sinforwin is a suite of business applications made up of a high number of modules and hundreds of thousands lines of code. The original applications connected to Microsoft Access databases through a technology called Opus Direct Access (a BDE clone that works with the DAO, Microsoft Access' engine) and were developed in Delphi 5.

Thanks to InstantBDExpress and Ethea's consultancy, the applications were first ported to Delphi 7, and then made to work with an Oracle back-end.

The software has been in parallel development (Access and Oracle) for a while, with the same code base for the two versions. Later, it was decided to start a Microsoft SQL Server port. It was not in the original plan, but since it's that easy...

The data size is that of a typical middle-size business application. Some parts of the program, developed with the use of techniques not suitable in a C/S architecture, were modified to reduce network load and boost performance.

The key features of InstantBDExpress in this project are:

• The Adapter strategy allowed us to virtualize all differences between Microsoft Access and Oracle (for example in terms of SQL dialect or error codes) thus making the code more and more database-independent as the project progressed.
• Full interface compatibility with the BDE components allowed the company's developers to work with BDE/Opus at design time and build the IBDX/Oracle version off the same code base.
• Ethea's consultancy service allowed to make changes to the DBExpress driver in order to harmonize data type mapping (which is quite a challenge going from Microsoft Access to Oracle). Problematic field types handled transparently in Sinforwin include autoinc, memo, and boolean.