FireDAC Add On discountinued? (Good by Embarcadero?)

[Juan C.Cilleruelo 12]

These days I've received the offer to renovate Delphi Professional Subscription, but this time don't come with the FireDAC Add-On, like past years. 
 

Asked my local reseller in Spain about this, he said to me that FireDAC Add On is discontinued. 
 

Does anyone know anything about this? 
 

Local reseller tells me about migration to Enterprise version, but there is not a special offer to upgrade from Professional version. He tells me that I need to buy a new subscription license, and I think this is very, very expensive, taking into account the type of product that I'm developing and selling. 

 

I think that Embarcadero is eliminating lower versions of his licences, converting Delphi into a luxury tool for development. 

 

This is not in concordance with the quality of his last versions. I'm currently using 10.3 Update 2, after tried to install, with a great effort of time and resources the 10.4.

Version 10.4 was significant, for me. The worst experience in years with Embarcadero. Nothing is working, but when at last I got an installation running (Patchs and Update 2) I notice that Mobile functionalities are not installed.

 

I've informed Embarcadero of this problem and he said to me that there is a problem with my license and that they are studying how to resolve it.

 

Because of this, I continued developing with the 10.3 version. 

 

If Embarcadero is going to be as expensive per licence, I think this is the moment of study the possibility of migrating to another environment. 

 

Evolution is a need, but not at any cost!  

[Markus Kinzler 174]

The database access components from DevArt are a good alternative to FireDAC.

[Alexander Elagin 143]

1 hour ago, Juan C.Cilleruelo said:

These days I've received the offer to renovate Delphi Professional Subscription, but this time don't come with the FireDAC Add-On, like past years. 

Use UniDAC, which is not too expensive and is a good independent alternative to FireDAC. It also supports Lazarus and older versions of Delphi. Switching from FireDAC is not difficult.

https://www.devart.com/unidac/

 

[Markus Kinzler 174]

AnyDAC (the predecessor of FireDAC) was a split off from CoreLabs (now DevArt) database components.

[Juan C.Cilleruelo 12]

17 minutes ago, Markus Kinzler said:

AnyDAC (the predecessor of FireDAC) was a split off from CoreLabs (now DevArt) database components.

I'm seeing Devart and seems to be a good option. But I can't understand his price policy. 

They only publicly a price. But I can't see the subscription price of the next years. It's this price every year?

[Attila Kovacs 629]

@Juan C.Cilleruelo 

Take a look at UniDAC (or SDAC) and at dbForge Studio for MSSQL, both are excellent tool sand DevArt is a really great partner.

I think you will be able to transform your own ORM to use UniDAC.

For the case, they also offer ORM's and .NET products.

They are also customer oriented and they have a great support.

 

Or, as I always mention, you could also quit your subscription and use the last IDE + FD what you have.

 

[Attila Kovacs 629]

@Juan C.Cilleruelo I think it's about half the price, but get an offer. And if you do so, don't miss this (if you have purchased FD separately back in the days) :

 

Do you offer competitive upgrades?

Yes, we do offer competitive upgrades, with the proof of purchase of competing product (invoice, order confirmation etc).

[Darian Miller 361]

22 minutes ago, Juan C.Cilleruelo said:

I'm seeing Devart and seems to be a good option. But I can't understand his price policy. 

They only publicly a price. But I can't see the subscription price of the next years. It's this price every year?

 

DevArt subscriptions default to 1 year of support and upgrades.  You have the option to buy 2 or 3 years up front at a discount.  It's a perpetual license, but you won't get any updates after your subscription expires if you don't renew.  Renewals are typically 40-50% of the price of the initial subscription, but you are correct, they don't display that cost.  I assume you can get a close guess of what the cost of annual renewal will be by comparing the 1 year to the 2 year initial price, and add about 10%.  (Rough estimate)    Before purchase, I sent them an email and specifically asked what the renewal price was.

 

I purchased pgDAC Pro last year for $500, which is the current list price.  I can renew the annual subscription today for $250.

 

It's getting close to be a real good time to buy tools and components.  As I posted on my blog last year, many component vendors offer Black Friday discounts: https://www.ideasawakened.com/post/black-friday-discounts-from-delphi-related-third-party-vendors

 

DevArt is apparently using the same URL as last year and this page contains discount codes good from Nov 23-29th, saving 20-50% off.  https://www.devart.com/blackfriday.html

 

I'll probably do a 2020 blog post with Black Friday deals once more are announced from various vendors. 

 

 

 

[Daniel 417]

3 hours ago, Juan C.Cilleruelo said:

Asked my local reseller in Spain about this, he said to me that FireDAC Add On is discontinued. 
 

Does anyone know anything about this? 

Well ... FireDAC will no longer be a separate product - but it is still under active development and will stay as part of the Enterprise (and above) editions of Delphi.

[Stano 143]

FireDAC is also in the professional. But only as embeded. FireDAC Add O n has not existed for a long time.
By the way, this has been discussed here recently. Just look it up.

[Joseph MItzen 251]

3 hours ago, Darian Miller said:

I purchased pgDAC Pro last year for $500, which is the current list price.  I can renew the annual subscription today for $250.

 

Honest question - you pay $500 and then $250 a year to use an open source database, with none of that money going back to the database project itself?

[Joseph MItzen 251]

6 hours ago, Juan C.Cilleruelo said:

Does anyone know anything about this? 

It was like a one step forward, one step back situation: I believe they removed FireDAC from Professional at the same time they added Mobile support to it.

[Darian Miller 361]

1 hour ago, Joseph MItzen said:

Honest question - you pay $500 and then $250 a year to use an open source database, with none of that money going back to the database project itself?

 

That's a honest question, when you know the answer?

 

[Markus Kinzler 174]

There are other solutions.

 

The FireDAC addon wasn't gratis btw.

[FPiette 383]

14 hours ago, Juan C.Cilleruelo said:

Version 10.4 was significant, for me. The worst experience in years with Embarcadero. Nothing is working

Very strange. Can you tell us what is not working?

For me, going from one version to the next never resulted in problem, even for very large applications (Windows VCL only).

 

[Juan C.Cilleruelo 12]

13 hours ago, Daniel said:

Well ... FireDAC will no longer be a separate product - but it is still under active development and will stay as part of the Enterprise (and above) editions of Delphi.

FireDAC       "A D D -  O N "       is discontinued. 

[bazzer747 25]

I used Delphi Professional for years, and had the Firedac add-on as together they gave me all I wanted from the product. I'm not into cross-platform development or server development so Enterprise was of no interest. Until they stopped the FireDac add-on in Profession a few years back. However, at the same time, they did a very good deal (so I thought!) to migrate to Enterprise, which includes Firedac. Which I did.

 

Pity, I should have bitten the bullet then and used a different method of connecting databases, and stuck with Professional. All my projects used Firedac quite intensively so to move away from Enterprise now would be a major step. The cost of an Enterprise licence went up over 30% this year, completely unjustifiable in my opinion, and I've therefore lapsed my licence. 10.4.1 is where I am and where I'll stay for the foreseeable future.

[Stano 143]

They mainly push us there, which a large part of users do not want. Personally, I only need the Windows platform (VCL). Unfortunately, I'm not alone ...

[FredS 138]

1 hour ago, bazzer747 said:

All my projects used Firedac quite intensively so to move away from Enterprise now would be a major step.

Besides cost once your projects are fine tuned it can take a long time of frustrated user input to iron out differences..
 

Back when I looked at FireDAC it was around $900 plus subscription fees while UniDAC was ~$400.. now that initial investment is null and that includes time spent..

Edited November 19, 2020 by FredS

[Juan C.Cilleruelo 12]

Change from FireDAC to another set of components like Devart is not going to be a problem in my case. 

 

My software follows a strict MVC architecture. All the Models are independent of the rest for the application and in fact, there are tested as a separate unity.  I have a project of Unit-Tests that test separately all the models without link any Controller.

 

Only some functionalities of FireDAC I'm going to miss, but I'm sure that in a new set of components I'm going to find new functionalities too, that is going to make more special the experience.

 

The problem, in my case, is the frustration of making plans and see how Embarcadero doesn't take you into account.

 

To see that Embarcadero trace his own plans without the worry about the plans of his customers. 

 

What's Next?  Eliminate Professional version, perhaps?

 

They coming bad times to all of us. Times in which the price can be a very, very, very important thing in all the ambits. 

 

In these new times, decisions based exclusively on money are going to be frequent. 

[Attila Kovacs 629]

1 hour ago, Juan C.Cilleruelo said:

Only some functionalities of FireDAC I'm going to miss

Which ones?

[Guest]

Who remembers:
Borland Kylix - died in the cradle!
RADPHP - died in the cradle!
AnyDAC dies for FireDAC to be born!
DBX is the basis of DataSnap
DataSnap gives way to RAD Server
Intraweb gives way to RAD Server
Phyton is coming .... Will it repeat the problems with Linux and Android?

Soon, RAD Studio will have to hire a new construction company because the space is getting too small for this "studio".

And the Report Center just filling the mailbox.
RAD Studio 10.4, ask for help for 10.4.1, but it doesn't arrive in time and 10.4.2 has to get into action, soon, soon!
Maybe better to wait for 10.5!

Not to mention the "push" they gave when Google gave the ultimatum to receive only 64-bit applications ...

And so it is pushed with the belly, until the almost dead, cry out: HELP !!!

[Juan C.Cilleruelo 12]

12 hours ago, Attila Kovacs said:

Which ones?

Maybe the Preprocessing of SQL Statements. 
But I have not still installed Devart. Maybe Devart has something similar or better.

 

By another hand, this is quite simple of solve, loading the query text from the code every time. 

 

I use it to do queries that depend on the dialect.  

[Alexander Elagin 143]

UniDAC has a nice feature called Unified SQL (https://www.devart.com/unidac/docs/unisql.htm) which can be used to automatically preprocess SQL statements based on macros and conditionals. Maybe this can help you.

[Juan C.Cilleruelo 12]

8 minutes ago, Alexander Elagin said:

UniDAC has a nice feature called Unified SQL (https://www.devart.com/unidac/docs/unisql.htm) which can be used to automatically preprocess SQL statements based on macros and conditionals. Maybe this can help you.

Thank you to inform me!