The Advantage Database Server is a RDBMS (relational database management system), but it is not a full-scale database development environment. While Advantage includes tools for creating and configuring the files that will be used by a database application, you do not use it directly to build the actual client applications. For that purpose you use one of a wide range of development environments.

This section is designed to provide you with a broad understanding of the role that Advantage and the tools that come with it, play in application development. To meet this end, this discussion is broken down into two parts: creating the database and creating the client applications.