I am developing an app. that will store approx. 500,000 contacts.
Are you sure this is an appropriate thing to do on a Palm (or any PDA)?
If each contact has only 4 fields (first name, last name, phone number and email), the database will need 2M just for the null terminating bytes. Even on a 16M device, each record can average only about 32 bytes ( minus the terminating bytes) of data. So for the four field example each field will be on average 7 bytes. And that's a more efficient form of storage than your fixed field width suggestion.
And that's even before we've considered the display problems of showing 1000 "Smith"s.
Syncing will likewise take forever. Even if you pack many logical records in to one physical record, just transferring that much data is going to take ages.
I can't help but think that nobody actually knows half a million people, and that there might well be a way to drastically shorten the amount of data really needed. If there truly is not, then perhaps a laptop would be a better choice.
Cheers, Jim Cooper
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Jim Cooper [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tabdee Ltd http://www.tabdee.ltd.uk
TurboSync - Connecting Delphi to your Palm __________________________________________
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