BDE Advanced Settings
From EnablerWiki
Created: 26 October 2009. Last Reviewed: 26 October 2009
Enabler uses a technology from Borland known as the Borland Database Engine, or BDE, to access its database files. Enabler allows certain parameters that control the operation of the BDE to be configured. These settings are written by Enabler to the Registry, where the BDE looks for its configuration.
These settings in Enabler are found in Configuration / Database Setup on the tab titled “BDE Settings”:
Enabling the use of advanced settings and using the Recommned Settings (click Recommended Settings) can yield quite substantial performance improvements compared with the BDE default settings that would otherwise be used. The settings specified in this screen take affect only when:
- The new settings have been successfully written to the Registry
- All BDE client applications (including Enabler POS, Back Office and Nibbler) have been closed and restarted. Sometimes it is easier to restart the machine to be sure.
Writing Settings to the Registry
The Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Borland\Database Engine\Settings\SYSTEM\INIT might be secured such that POS logins cannot write to it. This can be determined by clicking the Test Registry Access button from the BDE settings screen on each terminal. Remember, however, that although you might have Registry Access when configuring these settings on your Enabler head office server, store machines might not have appropriate registry access. In order to allow the settings to be written to the Registry, you might have to log in as an administrator account one time only and load Enabler. Enabler would update the registry as it loads, and because the Registry data is in HKLM, not HKCU, this setting will continue to apply once you resume your normal Windows login.
Testing Impact of These Settings
As these settings change the memory footprint of the BDE, you might have to experiment with alternative BDE shared memory address settings. Once these changes have been made, verify that Enabler still runs without displaying error messages relating to BDE memory. It is important to verify that POS and Nibbler can both run, no matter which order they are loaded (POS first vs Nibbler first). For servers, try loading Back Office as well.
Note that if you have multiple machine types, configurations or Windows versions, you should test and verify these new settings on each platform.
