The licence varies on the version, I think Delphi 6 personal allows for commercial developement if you buy the shrink wrapped version, the others may only allow non commercial development.
There is another option you may not be aware of: http://www.icsharpcode.com/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx
Totally free and rivals Visual Studio.net and has a visual form developer. Check it out. You can use it with the Npgsql native .net data provider for Postgresql. Not as easy to develop DB apps as Delphi, but a better choice than Access.
You can create a databound form in Delphi just as easily as access and you don't need to learn VBA or Python, just Pascal.
Delphi is Pascal (object pascal to be exact) and is easy to learn and intuitive. It was taught at most high schools/universities before Java came around
As far as the testing goes I am just try to get across the fact that the type of testing you are doing is kind of a waste of time on a client/server type system. Like I said before it's fine for Access or Dbase.
Bringing huge results sets (250,000) can bring Oracle to it's knees if the conditions are right.
Access is probably doing some kind of internal paging, it's not really bringing back 250,000 rows. Rekal on the other hand probably attempts to bring back all them and that's why it hangs. It can take a huge amount of time to bring back that many records across the wire, especially if you are on simple home network that is probably running at 10mbits per second in half duplex mode. Using a massive amount of rows to test your dev tools is flawed because of the fact one may be doing paging and the other is not.
I would just like to find a free, or low cost basic like language that would let easily paint GUI forms in some IDE, and then easily add my own script to interact with the Postgresql database. Such an a development environment, and such tutorials should be very common and easily accessible, since a sql engine is not much use unless you can access it.
Probably Powerbasic or Realbasic would do what I want, and I would feel comfortable with them, but they are rather expensive.
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