Now that we have covered some ways to use FireDAC even without an underlying DBMS, we can step back to what is probably the main (but not exclusive) focus of this library: dealing with a DBMS (a traditional one like an RDBMS or even modern ones like NoSQL).
The first task you need to accomplish is usually to set up a connection to the data source (the DBMS). Either for historical or practical reasons, there are a number of ways to define connections.
The first great distinction is between defining a connection through its set of parameters rather than using a connection definition name. The following screenshot shows the component editor available for TFDConnection, including the list of configuration parameters composing the connection definition:
As you can see, you can drop a TFDConnection object on your form/frame/data module and start configuring it. On the left of the screenshot, you will notice the Object Inspector IDE window showing the...