Today (December 20th 2022) and tomorrow you can join us for Embarcadero’s two day Enterprise CodeRage event which focusses, as you might expect, on enterprise development topics using your favorite IDE software. I am presenting two sessions – this blog post describes the first session: How To Make MySQL Your SQL. The second session is tomorrow (December 21st 2022) and there is a separate post to accompany that too. I’ll update these articles with links to the replays in case you miss them.
Table of Contents
The brief history of MySQL
Back in the ’90s databases meant things like Paradox and DBase both of which very much ruled the roost. Spin forward a few years and as the price of computing power dropped and networking stepped out of the shadows of the murky world of Banyan Vines and coaxial cables behemoths like Oracle, SQL Server, and IBM’s DB2 and the like started to challenge the huge data stores which were previously propping up the sales in the mainframe world. Then, into this new DB arena came MySQL. Thanks to the fact it was open source and well written it very quickly rose to challenge Microsoft’s emerging dominance for the mid-level relational database business. It was successful enough that Sun Microsystems bought up the MySQL AB company at an eye-watering price. Zip forward to the present day and MySQL is now owned by database goliath Oracle, a definite endorsement of the market significance of MySQL.
Why is MySQL important?
As I explain my presentation, MySQL is everywhere. Literally. It has become a hugely popular ACID-compliant relational database management system. It is behind hundreds of thousands of websites and corporate software stacks. Even to this day, despite Oracle’s ownership, MySQL is freely available as open source and runs on almost every possible platform and configuration you can imagine. Sooner or later, in the enterprise software world you are going to find you need to work with a MySQL database server.
How does RAD Studio with Delphi and C++ Builder work with MySQL?
Ever since the very first release Delphi has been a powerful tool for accessing corporate databases of almost every imaginable type. The data aware controls that came with Delphi 1 were, at the time, a novelty and pre-dated such techniques as data binding at least a decade. RAD Studio, whether you are using Delphi or C++ as the programming language, can easily connect to pretty much any popular database available, including Oracle, MS SQL Server and, yes, of course, MySQL. It does this very easily and is the backbone of many enterprise solutions where a Delphi program is happily whizzing through scads of data and enabling the business of business to take place.
What does the Make MySQL your SQL Enterprise CodeRage session teach you?
Follow along live later today or catch up with the replays to see me demonstrate how to get download and install MySQL, and then access it in three different ways using RAD Studio with Delphi. The session itself is only 50 minutes long but I cover the history of MySQL and MariaDB along with how to set up your Delphi (and C++ Builder) apps to connect with MySQL and I even show you previewing the MySQL data live in the RAD Studio IDE even though (currently) the official documentation says that’s not possible.
If you’ve ever wanted to know more about MySQL and/or want to know how to write apps to communicate with a MySQL server then this session covers it all. I also show the built-in FireDAC components as well as two popular third-party database component sets.
Make MySQL your SQL slides
The slides from the session are here: https://github.com/checkdigits/MakeMySQLYourSQL
Here are the slides as images:
