Synopse Open Source

The 2011 TIOBE Index is a gauge that has long tracked the rise and fall of programming languages. First developed during the mid-1990s, the index relies on various data sources to gauge the popularity of languages; that is, the extent to which they're used (but not how much they're liked).

The problem is that it split Delphi and Pascal into two diverse categories. Without this distinction, we would be in the top ten!

Synopse Big Table is an open source Delphi unit for very fast data storage and access, using key/values pairs, or records organized with fields.

With this 1.12a version, the unit has evolved into a true field-oriented database, with two new classes:
- TSynBigTableRecord to store an unlimited number of records with fields;
- TSynBigTableMetaData to store any data (pictures, HTML, text) associated with metadata fields.

Both classes handle variable-length storage of integers, floats, currency, text (Unicode or not) with a field name. On-the-fly field adding, integrated indexing and search capabilities.
Data access can be either fast direct access, or via late-binding (i.e. use Record.Field in your Delphi code).

Classic Key/Value storage is always possible via TSynBigTable or TSynBigTableString, but is now faster and safer. A few issues were corrected.

Update: version 1.12b has been published (same download link).
Some issues have been fixed about packing and the two new classes types.

Up to now, most SQL statements were parsed, then prepared before execution.
Only individual TSQLRecord content retrieval was using prepared statements.

For the upcoming version 1.12 of the framework, we added an internal SQL statement cache in the database access.
That is, if a previous SQL statement is run with some parameters, a prepared version, available in cache, is used, and new parameters are bounded to it before the execution by SQLite3.

In some cases, it can speed the SQLite3 process a lot.