The Borland Database Engine (BDE) is a data-access mechanism that can be shared by several applications. The BDE defines a powerful library of API calls that can create, restructure, fetch data from, update, and otherwise manipulate local and remote database servers. The BDE provides a uniform interface to access a wide variety of database servers, using drivers to connect to different databases. Depending on your edition of Delphi, you can use the drivers for local databases (Paradox, dBASE, FoxPro, and Access) and an ODBC adapter that lets you supply your own ODBC drivers. 

When deploying BDE-based applications, you must include the BDE with your application. While this increases the size of the application and the complexity of deployment, the BDE can be shared with other BDE-based applications and provides a broad range of support for database manipulation. Although you can use the BDE's API directly in your application, the components on the BDE category of the Tool palette wrap most of this functionality for you.