>I understand how VFS works, what I was asking is whether reading
>directly from the card is the Palm blessed way of doing it or not. I
>vaguely remember some discussions at the conference about doing card
>accesses being slower, so I wasn't sure if that was what was supposed to
>be done or if the data should be copied into RAM first.
It'll really depend on your application, how often you read from the card,
whether you need to write to the databases, how big they are, etc. It
isn't a black and white decision.
If your database is read-only, and you only occasionally read in portions
of it, then leave it on the card. Consider caching parts, or fully copying
the database if you need more frequent and faster access to large portions.
Writing to a PDB on a card is complex, particularly if you need to resize
records, so that's another reason to consider copying it internally if
there's room.
Think of it as a hard drive. Everything has to be copied into RAM to be
accessed; the question is how much you read in at a time, and when you do
the reading. Same situation for VFS volumes.
-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support
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