A couple of months ago there was a thread on the number of records that can
be stored in a file under older versions of Palm OS and I never saw a
definitive answer. I was doing something related to that this morning and I
did some testing. I'm loading the SKU file for a small chain of hardware
stores. They have about 16,000 active skus and a cross-reference file of
21,599 records in the tests I did. The cross-reference file has 18
character records and I knew from past experience that I can load it and not
have any performance problems. I download the the file via hotsync in a
file with the records packed 32 to a block then I unload them on the PDA to
a file with individual records. I just wrote each record to the end of the
file. On a Handera 330 (which I think has Palm OS 3.5) it takes about a
minute to unpack them starting with a newly created file.
For my test I just didn't create a new file each time I downloaded new
records and I did it two more times. The second time it took about 10
minutes and the file had 43,198 records when I was done unpacking. The
third time it took over an hour to unpack the records and there were 64,797
records in the file when I finished. I didn't find the upper limit to the
number of records that could be loaded in one file because I didn't want to
spend a couple hours loading them again but it seems performance would fall
off to something unacceptable a long time before the file had the maximum
number of records. For my application I guess that would be about 30,000
records the way I'm doing things.
Does anyone know if this situation is improved under OS 5?
I'd also be interested in the file sizes for different retail applications.
My files are for a fairly specialized retailer and they don't include SKU's
that are no longer active. Has anyone had any experience with a retailer
like a Wal-Mart Super Center or a Lowes? I'm guessing they would have over
100,000 skus but maybe someone knows for sure.
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