About dServe
dSERVE Has Been Discontinued
Please note that sales and support of dSERVE was discontinued in 2014.
Support to existing customers is limited and billable. We encourage a migration
to ODBC or similar technologies available through Basis and PxPlus for their
respective platforms. Under limited circumstances, we will consider licensing
the dSERVE source code. If this interests you, please contact us.
The following information is provided for historical reference.
dSERVE
TM is a Business Basic file system server that provides access to
BBx and ProvideX files from non-BBx or ProvideX environments. dSERVE is actually
a Business Basic task running in background, listening on a TCP/IP socket for
connections from any TCP/IP aware environment. Files are opened, records, keys, and
expressions are returned, all very quickly. As a native task is accessing the files,
there is no translation overhead. Your application can read with keys and alternate key chains, just like a standard Business Basic program. If your application requires
it, you can also use dSERVE's extract, write, and remove capabilities.
dSERVE is often compared with using ODBC to access Business Basic data, but differs
significantly from ODBC in how file access and navigation is implemented. ODBC works
with files exclusively via SQL, where sets of records are retrieved with a single
command. This technique is efficient when traversing a single file, but relies on
properly designed indexes to perform well in a multi-file application. Most Business
Basic applications do not have files that are designed with SQL performance in mind,
with the result that ODBC access is sometimes too slow for the requirements of a given
custom application. dSERVE instead uses native low-level access to individual records by their key,
which is exactly how Business Basic files are designed to be accessed. The result is fast performance and low overhead when needing to access data from a custom application.
In addition to keyed file I/O, dSERVE supports keyed and text file creation, binary read and write to
text or binary data files, fast file exporting to tab, csv, xml, and ado-xml
formats, and support for the BASIS SQL Engine.
Important benefits include:
- Low overhead with direct, native I/O to BBx and ProvideX data files.
- Quick connections, typically measured in hundredths of a second, for
real-time access to data records.
- Support for record- and field-oriented data.
- Support for internal BASIS and ProvideX data dictionary formats, or raw,
physical field formats.
- Platform-independent server runs where your BBx or ProvideX engine and data
reside.
- Multiple programming language clients included.
- Server-side, connection-based licensing.
dSERVE comes with three client technologies for Windows and Linux/Unix development:
- An ActiveX DLL COM object for Windows programming in Visual Basic, C++,
.NET, Visual FoxPro, Delphi, VBScript, and other languages.
- A Perl module for use in platform-independent Perl development.
- A PHP class for platform-independent web development in PHP.
In addition, the server interface is fully documented, so programmers in other
environments can develop their own client technology.
Some additional dSERVE features include:
- IP address and file location filtering for security.
- Server-based write/remove/erase enabling.
- Support for the BASIS Data Dictionary, and ProvideX .ddf and .ini dictionary formats, with extensions for calculations and attribute overrides.
- Sophisticated date handling.
- Support for both record-style and field-style reads, and dynamic expressions.
dSERVE is available for PRO/5 and Visual PRO/5 (revision 2.2 and up), and ProvideX.
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