And lo, the people of Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero did deliver up a child, and its name was XE2, at it was a 64bit child, and it was good.

And lo Tim did deliver up a child, and its name was 64bit ElevateDB & it is probably pretty good too, but I haven't tried it yet.

--

Now: I have dozens of applications in the field with 32 bit EDB + 32 bit delphi apps. A good number have back-up / hosting on the Amazon cloud (all done with simple scripting from an EDB Server to upload updates / backup files).

Right now all my code + the Amazon machine(s) are 32 bit & run 32 bit EDB / delphi apps. My life is pretty easy on the compiler side of things actually.

--

Questions on going to 64 bit.

1. Can I run 64bit EDBServer on an unmodified database to serve up data? Can it serve data to any machine?

2. How about running 64bit EDBServer on Amazon, while the customer's server is 32bit (they share a database, copying it between them, not actually sharing files).

3. Say I have 2 EDBServer instances 1 64bit & 1 32bit both accessing the same DB, but serving it up to different apps?

3. My customers mix client machines from Windows XP - Win 7 Pro as an OS. I can't control this. At present I tend to  install a single EXE file on the server & all clients share it (running locally, but accessing data via IP from the server). Will I be able to install 2 versions of the EXE (64bit & 32 bit) & just run these against the server, pointing the old machines to the 32 bit with the new ones pointing at the 64 bit?

4. I am guessing that I will now have to maintain 2 versions of my source, 1 with 32 bit components & 1 with 64 bit ... or at least 1 version to compile to 64 the other to 32 ... any useful comments on how to do this??

I realise that all the answers to these questions are probably "yes of course" (and something like find out for yourself you lazy xxx for the last one) ... but I would just like to check on any possible issues with these scenarios so I have my head up on the way in as they say.

(As a final techie aside I have to say I am embarrassed at how excited I am about all the new stuff in XE2!)

Adam

Adam


One thing that will fascinate me is what benefits going to 64bit really delivers. Obviously I can see where a major data thrashing or serious computation app will become much faster, but for the majority of apps whose very existence is to be stared at by users 98% of the time and where any activity is dependent on a sluggish network connection I just don't get it.

Roy Lambert

It's not out yet so Tim is the only authority but i would assume that mixing 32 and 64 should be fine in C/S (meaning 64bit server and mix of client apps) - communication is tcp so well abstracted.

Shared file access mostly relies on setting locks so again should be doable with mixed app accessing it.

Time will tell - Tim is expected to ship these late in October as per last update.

As to maintaining the source you will only have 1 version to track - since IDE itself is 32bit all the components you see are also 32 and only during compile if target is 64 will the 64bit components included instead. the 64 and 32 are target platforms in XE2 so single project can target both.

Raul

Roy,

You may see up to 10% improvement in execution time (no benchmarks i've seen - most of this is based blogs and such of people who have converted - and some of this is from MS camp also).

Most of the speed increase is supposedly attributable to the new compiler that targets the native 64bit instruction set of your 64bit CPU - which most of us have assuming our cpu is only few years old - and that 64bit cpu is actually more efficient in running 64bit code than 32bit one.

There likely are also other side-benefits like increased OS resources available - OS level handles, max number of network connections etc which we have run into so looking forward to testing 64bit version of our app.

Caveat emptor - you'll have to recompile your app to see if there is any difference. Realistically if you're waiting on network or user interface to repaint the the 64bits makes no difference.

Raul


<<
Roy Lambert wrote:

One thing that will fascinate me is what benefits going to 64bit really delivers. Obviously I can see where a major data thrashing or serious computation app will become much faster, but for the majority of apps whose very existence is to be stared at by users 98% of the time and where any activity is dependent on a sluggish network connection I just don't get it.

>>

I can't see how going from 32 to 64 bit can only deliver 10% improvement (I know that that is what everyone is saying). Going from 16 bit to 32 certainly yielded a lot more than 10% !!! I guess that systems are just much less processor constrained than they used to be, other parts of the system (like disk-access-speed) are more important.

I guess that the major benefit would be to a server running EDBServer to a number of clients with lots of query load, here with very processor intensive activity I would expect to see quite big leaps in performance.

I wonder whether 64 bit servers would benefit from things like solid-state hard-drives, rather than conventional disk-based systems? My databases are actually quite small (100 meg is big!) so I could use solid state memory for the whole server if necessary.

Also, I am curious whether anyone is actually building 64 bit stuff in XE2 yet ... I am particularly curious about the reality of whether it is 1 code-base for 64 / 32 bit or whether you have to branch?

Raul


My point is more that most PCs these days sit around doing nothing most of the time. Take Word. Moving to 64bit might allow it to type faster than I can but that's only because it has so much crap built in (the other day it just lost the cursor completely). Most programs with user interaction (excluding games) are going to be sitting waiting for the user to do something almost all the time.

Roy Lambert

Roy,

Agreed.

There are number of other reasons though  you might want to do 64bit for end user app:

- if you need to interface with any 3rd party DLL that is 64 bit (i have a 3rd party vendor library we use to read data from their external hardware and new drivers are 64bit only so we were kind of stuck and i was planning to check out the bridge library from EDN but now i don't have to)

- if you need to use any COM objects that are 64bit - for example MAPI for Outlook or maybe Excel. Our customers are starting to get the Win7 64bit with Office 64bit as default install now on new machines so we're advising them revert back to 32bit office.

- Finally adding "64bit" support under a new feature in new version is good from marketing perspective

Raul


<<
Roy Lambert wrote:

My point is more that most PCs these days sit around doing nothing most of the time. Take Word. Moving to 64bit might allow it to type faster than I can but that's only because it has so much crap built in (the other day it just lost the cursor completely). Most programs with user interaction (excluding games) are going to be sitting waiting for the user to do something almost all the time.

>>

<< Take Word. Moving to 64bit might allow it to type faster than I can ...
>>

Your copy of Word can type for you?  Cool!


David Cornelius
Cornelius Concepts

LOL!  Good questions--and a hilarious presentation thereof.

David Cornelius
Cornelius Concepts

Raul


>- if you need to use any COM objects that are 64bit - for example MAPI for Outlook or maybe Excel. Our customers are starting to get the Win7 64bit with Office 64bit as default install now on new machines so we're advising them revert back to 32bit office.

That's a good reason and going to become more common.

>- Finally adding "64bit" support under a new feature in new version is good from marketing perspective

Says nasty things about the education of customers

but I agree

Roy Lambert