John R. Hogerhuis wrote: > I suggest for data entry just use TEXT. You can use tabs or commas as field > separators, CRLF as record separator and then import using tab separated > CSV on your desktop. Very little overhead this way, maximizing use of your T's RAM.
Thanks for the advice. That was the first version I made, but it had a few problems for my case. - Not all data I wanted fitted in the 32KB - Loading it in a basic program to do data reports took about one minute (and also limited the data volume since they had to fit twice: once in the file and once in basic's RAM) I ended up using CO files to store my data in binary. It's very interesting for integers since they take only two bytes each instead of 1-5 bytes + 1 byte for the separator. Also I stored my strings in a separate CO file, so the main data file has "fixed length records". This allowed me to implement a simple random access file support. And most important, I no longer load the files in basic RAM, but instead parse the directory structure to find the file's address in storage RAM and peek/poke directly in it. >If you want to get really fancy you could make a BASIC program that > would process the DO file and format search results on screen. I actually re-implemented the "DO files forms" from Lucid-Database as I found it was a very clever way to do this. I cheated a little with "formula fields" by basically using them as "hooks entry points" for basic subroutines (so it's more an DB API for BASIC than a stand alone DB engine) but it does the job. At the moment I have 809 records and 15430 bytes of data + 1682 bytes of index and the "loading" takes about one second (the slower part is the loading of the form.do which uses basic files functions). Finding a record by record number is too quick to me measured, and searching a record by string search takes between 0 and 4 seconds (I'll probably try rewriting this part in assembly as soon as I read a good book about it). This is a fun project so far and since it's really a pet project and I have no deadline I tried to do the maximum only using the M100 instead of using the PC to pre-process the data files for the fun of it :o) Because of this, when I calculated the index files used for alphabetic research it took the M100 about 7 hours (it's a good thing I had an AC power adapter). It's not totally finished yet but if someone is interested in how I did this I'd be happy to share the code and share things I've learn in the process. Eric PS: Before starting this, I also tried T-Base but it wasn't as nice to use as Lucid, and also entering/editing data was very slow
