Hi Danny, Everyone who would reply to this would have a different opinion... here's mine...
On Monday, March 18, 2002, at 01:07 PM, Danny Arsenault wrote: > The reason I was thinking about dispensing with the DB backend is > because I > have a very cranky database which is holding information that does not > need > to be "dynamic." I have a couple thousand product thumbnails (and this > number increases by about 2000 every month) and all of their sizes are > sitting in an FMP database. Then there are a hundred fifty thousand > product > descriptions, all sitting in the same FMP database, but they are rarely > changed, so I could just update one "record" as needed rather than > keeping > the whole thing dynamic just to take care of those few times. > > This database crashes a lot. do you want to implement the text-based solution because the database is cranky? What if the db weren't cranky? Actually, the db shouldn't be cranky at all, and should never crash. MySQL is a really nice product... and works very well with Perl. You don't need to learn much at all... about 5-6 commands, sub-routines, that would do the job for you. Just read up the one web-page on the MySQL driver on the Perl DBI section of symbolstone.org... you will be set. Unless you have some special affection for FMP and lasso, I would say chuck 'em... a one-click install of the latest MySQL build from Marc Liyanage's web-site (www.entropy.ch), and with Perl that you already have you have an industrial strength solution for free. MySQL itself is really easy... well, basically, SQL is conceptually really easy, and there are countless good resources on the web that will get you going at it. Most anything you are doing with FMP will be fairly easily do-able with SQL. So, that's my own biased bit... Perl not an alternative to MySQL. Instead, MySQL _and_ Perl will work like a champ for you. pk/
