I am not really a beginner with dbisam but until now I always worked with local tables.

My application is made in Delphi 5 Enterprise using dbisamtables (version 4.29 build 4).  

So far so good. No problems.

Now some of the customers would like to install the apllication on more than one PC (not connected in a network) and would like the tables to be put on the location where their website is hosted.  

We don't intend to make a webapplication.  Every user will have to install the application on his local computer

Is this possible?  What are the different steps to be made?

I'm willing to follow a course somewhere but are there possibilities in Belgium?

Paul Waegemans.

Paul

>Now some of the customers would like to install the apllication on more than one PC (not connected in a network) and would like the tables to be put on the location where their website is hosted.
>
>We don't intend to make a webapplication. Every user will have to install the application on his local computer

Can you clarify something please. The tables are going to be located on the website host. Are the users going to access those tables on the website or download to their local PC? Are there going to be several users accessing the same tables at the same time?

If the tables are going to be accessed from the website host then you really need to move to client/server rather than fileserver style operations. You'll also need to make sure the website host can and will run the DBISAM server (ie a Windows program so it won't run on a Linux host). If the website host is external to the company you'll also have to think about latency issues. Its a lot different running over a network where the speed is only a few Mbits rather than a LAN where its 100Mbs or a local hard drive which is even faster.

There's a lot of people on these newsgroups who have a lot of experience of these sorts of things and hopefully some of them will chip in.

[Team Elevate]

Paul,

I will assume your customers want a common dbisam web hosted database (all of them access same set of data from different computers/locations).

You do need to move to client/server model for this and get the dbsrrvr installed on the web hosting server. As Roy mentioned you do need a windows hosting allowing to run dbsrvr.

What i would suggest to get started is to use the Amazon Cloud  - their free usage tier for EC2 gives you access to a micro instance of a windows machine free for a year so you can test it out and even run it for a while to work out performance issues etc.

Amazon services: https://aws.amazon.com/

You need to sign up for a free account and then create an EC2 computer instance.  There was a good post in these NGs maybe last year on setting all of this up - step-by-step so do a search.

Once you have the instance running you can connect to it remotely and configure like any other windows system - install and configure DBSRVR, open ports and you should be ready to go.

Next step would be to change your code to use c/s instead of local tables.

You will need to do some performance testing as connection over internet will be (relatively) slower than local table access so some app optimization might be in order as well.

Raul




<<
Now some of the customers would like to install the apllication on more than one PC (not connected in a network) and would like the tables to be put on the location where their website is hosted.  

We don't intend to make a webapplication.  Every user will have to install the application on his local computer

Is this possible?  What are the different steps to be made?
>>

Paul,

I would concur with Raul's suggestion about Amazon cloud, it is a quick, easy way to set up your own remote server. It is not free, there is a good "first xx months free" offer, but then you pay. However the amount you pay is very little compared with other options.

I have set up DBISAM on Amazon cloud, but then moved to ElevateDB quite quickly. Not because DBISAM was at fault, just because I needed other Elevate features.

I wrote an article about creating an Amazon Cloud instance and setting up a Morfik website service on it. The steps for creating an instance on which DBISAM would run are more-or-less the same.

I attach this article here.

The article should give you reasonable pointers on setting up. The only extra step is that for the Amazon server to be accessible to your general users you must open a port on the server. I did have a document I had written about this too ... sorry I just can't find it anywhere ... there are good articles about this on Google. Google "opening ports in windows server firewall" or something similar.

You will then need to rebuild your Delphi App so that the SessionType is Remote not Local, and provide a RemoteIP. It is now about 18 months since I touched DBISAM, so I am sorry if my memory of the components is a bit fuzzy.

Note that there will be much more "latency" on your application if the users are always accessing through the remote server unless their internet connection is very very fast.

You may want to think about modelling your application so that the user connects to the cloud, downloads some tables and then operates with local data, perhaps posting updates to the cloud from time to time. Such a model is possible in DBISAM, and is supported really well with replication functionality in Elevate.

Good Luck.

>>I did have a document I had written about this too ... sorry I just can't find it anywhere ... there are good articles >>about this on Google. Google "opening ports in windows server firewall" or something similar.

Found it ... attached ... its rubbish, but it includes a link to a good web article! Hope its useful.

I was out the running for a while...

To all the people who gives me suggestions: thanks.

I was out the running for a while...

To all the people who gives me suggestions: thanks.