A library of components that provides native connectivity to Oracle from Delphi
Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC) is a library of components that provides native connectivity to Oracle from Delphi, Delphi for .NET, C++Builder, Kylix, and Free Pascal. The ODAC library is designed to help programmers develop faster and cleaner Oracle database applications.
ODAC is a complete replacement for standard Oracle connectivity solutions and presents an efficient native alternative to the Borland Database Engine and dbExpress for access to Oracle.
Features
The following list describes the main features of Oracle Data Access Components.
* Direct access to server data. Does not require installation of other data provider layers (such as BDE and ODBC)
* In Direct mode does not require Oracle client software and works directly through TCP/IP
* VCL, VCL.NET, and CLX versions of library available
* Full support of the latest versions of Oracle
* Support for all Oracle data types
* Disconnected Model with automatic connection control for working with data offline
* Local Failover for detecting connection loss and implicitly re-executing certain operations
* Oracle Transparent Application Failover support
* All types of local sorting and filtering, including by calculated and lookup fields
* Automatic data updating with TOraQuery, TSmartQuery, and TOraTable components
* Unicode and national charsets support
* Distributed transaction support
* Oracle Advanced Queuing support
* Support for many Oracle-specific features, such as alerts, pipes and direct path interface
* Advanced script execution functionality with TOraScript component
* Support for using Macros in SQL
* Integration with OraDeveloper Tools for performing advanced database development and administration tasks
* Easy migration from BDE with Migration Wizard
* Lets you use Professional Edition of Delphi, C++Builder, and Kylix to develop client/server applications
* Includes annual ODAC Subscription with Priority Support
* Licensed royalty-free per developer, per team, or per site
Connecting in Direct Mode
By default, ODAC, like most applications that work with Oracle, uses the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) to connect to the Oracle database server. This is referred to as connecting in Client mode, and it is the usual way to develop Oracle applications with a third-generation language. All OCI routines are stored in external libraries, so the executables for applications that work through OCI are small. However, working through OCI requires Oracle client software to be installed on target workstations. This is an inconvenience and causes additional installation and administration expenses. Furthermore, there are some situations in which installation of Oracle client is not advisable or may even be impossible; for example, when deploying an application to remote machines which do not have qualified administration.
To overcome these problems, ODAC Developer Edition and ODAC Professional Edition include an option to connect to Oracle directly over the network using the TCP/IP protocol. This is referred to as connecting in Direct mode. Connecting in Direct mode does not require Oracle client software to be installed on target machines. The only requirement for running an ODAC-based application that uses the Direct mode is that the operating system must have TCP/IP support.