Part I of this book shows you how to build and configure the tables, indexes, and data dictionaries that you access from Advantage. Chapter 1 begins with a broad overview of Advantage, providing you with a detailed understanding of the power, performance, and flexibility it provides.

Chapters 2 and 3 show you how to create the basic building blocks of a high-performance database. In Chapter 2, you discover how to define tables, the data structures in which your data is stored. And in Chapter 3, you explore indexes, the means to fast and efficient data access.

In Chapter 4, you learn the power of Advantage data dictionaries, including the many advanced features that data dictionaries provide. This chapter also shows you how to implement security using a data dictionary, including how to add users and groups to control access to your data.

Chapter 5 provides you with an in-depth look at constraints, record and field-level definitions that improve the accuracy of the data managed by ADS. And in Chapter 6, you discover how to create custom views of your tables. Included in this discussion is how you can modularize your access to data using views, simplifying what would otherwise require sophisticated data manipulations.

Chapters 7 and 8 describe Advantage's most advanced features: stored procedures and triggers. Not only do these chapters provide you with a detailed examination of the role that these features play in your applications, but they also show you how to implement these objects using some of today's popular development languages, including Delphi, Visual C# for .NET, and Visual Basic for .NET.

The final two chapters of this part of the book show you how to use two of the most exciting new features of ADS 8, online back up and replication. In Chapter 9 you will learn how to protect your investment in data by creating reliable backups of your data, permitting you to restore your database if disaster strikes. In Chapter 10, you will learn how to implement replication, a feature that pushes changes from one database to one or more additional databases.