Apollo: The early days

Applies to: Apollo VCL™

When Apollo 1.0 was released for Delphi 1.0 in 1995-1996, it was a revolutionary, breakthrough product. In fact, Apollo 1.0 was the first database add-on for Delphi. Apollo allowed CA-Clipper and FoxPro developers to use Delphi to manage their database applications and in doing so, helped the Delphi revolution.

Apollo accomplished this by "hacking" into the BDE and hooking into an undocumented TTable component. Back then, there was no TDataSet class to inherit from and, to this day, the internals of the BDE are still not documented. Suffice to say, information was hard to come by.

Apollo 1.0 did a brilliant job in accessing and managing data, but clearly Apollo suffered problems during this period because there was no documentation on how the BDE really worked.

During those days, many customers pushed Apollo 1.0 to it's limits, Beginning with Delphi 3, Borland finally introduced TDataSet, the class which abstracts the data management from the VCL GUI. Apollo 4.5 took full advantage of TDataSet by creating a new TApolloDataSet component, which inherited from TDataSet. TApolloDataSet allowed seemless integration into the data aware controls, without hacking at TTable. Beginining with Apollo 4.5, both TApolloDataSet and the original hacked-out TApollo components were shipped with Apollo.

Today, Apollo VCL 5 is the best release of Apollo ever. Winning it's third award for "Best Database Engine", Apollo VCL is clearly the number one database engine for Delphi and C++Builder.