Paradox (database)

Paradox for DOS was a relational database management system originally released by Ansa-Software. In September 1987 Borland purchased Ansa-Software including their Paradox/DOS 2.0. Notable classic versions were 3.5 and 4.5. Versions up to 3.5 were evolutions from 1.0. Version 4.0 and 4.5 were retooled in the Borland C++ windowing toolkit and used a different extended memory access scheme.

Paradox/DOS was a successful DOS-based database of the late eighties, early nineties. At that time, DBASE and its xBase clones (Foxpro, dbFast, Clipper programming language, dbXL) had the lion s share of the market. Other notable competitors were Clarion, DataEase, rBase, Dataflex, MDBS Knowledgeman.

The features that distinguished Paradox/DOS were:

*a visual Query By Example implementation that was supported by an AI engine. *effective use of memory (conventional as well as extended / expanded) - caching data tables and particularly, indexes which caused Paradox to execute tasks very quickly in contrast to the explicit skills required for xBase performance optimisation. *an innovative programming language the Paradox Application Language (PAL) that was readable, powerful, and could be recorded from keyboard actions (rather like Lotus 1-2-3 macro recording). Although not object oriented, PAL was called object based. *Lotus-like text menus and windows which was the native interface (in contrast to dBase which had a command line interface on top of which cumbersome menus were layered). *Particularly in Paradox 1.0 and 2.0, the user and programming manuals won readability awards - they were copiously illustrated, well laid out and explanations were written in common English. In contrast xBase and other manuals were text heavy, sometimes even typed in plain Courier with no attempt at professional page layout.

Paradox for Windows was a distinctly different product produced by a different team of programmers. Borland had by this time, acquired Ashton-Tate and was preoccupied in proving Object Oriented Programming, in designing Paradox/Windows and dBase/Windows in such a way that both would share a common database engine (called the Borland IDAPI engine). This shift in focus caused delivery datelines for Paradox/Windows and dBase/Windows to be much delayed allowing Microsoft to score well with a pre-Christmas release of their Microsoft Access database program. Microsoft Access was sold for a fraction of the price of Paradox/Windows and bundled with Word, Excel and Powerpoint in Microsoft Office Professional. Further, Access performance was good thanks to team contributions from Foxpro programmers.

Although there are many fans of ObjectPAL - the programming language for Paradox/Windows, PAL/DOS scripts could not easily be migrated - the object and event models were completely different forcing a developers using PAL to completely rewrite their database applications.