>On the other hand, if your data will fit in memory, then MetaCard is a
>great way to store it, database or not. I don't have experience of stacks
>larger than about 1000 cards, but I have used MetaCard on blocks of data
>as large as a few megabytes (30,000 lines in a text block, at about 100
>bytes per line) and a judiciously applied filter command can slice that
>like butter. Specifically, I broke it down into thousand-line chunks
>ahead of time, and ran the filter on each of them. It's actually very
>fast, and allows for good results. But it's not 30,000 cards, or even
>2000. Just a few, with data displayed dynamically in the fields.
The spellCheck.mc utility maintains about 130,000 lines stored as a
userProp and indexes them on openStack using arrays[a-z] for fast
on-the-fly string comparisons.
A project management database in mc of about 5,500 records is also very
fast. The use of marked cards handles subsets without a glitch and is
especially valuable in complex analysis reporting with data arrays and charts.
The main drawback about using mc as a database is the lack of built-in
simultaneous concurrent users and save-on-idle. On the up side, you can do
much more in terms of customised functionality and interactive behaviour
than eg FileMaker. Horses for courses.
/H
Hugh Senior
The Flexible Learning Company
Consultant Programming & Software Solutions
Fax/Voice: +44 (0)1483.27 87 27
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