Nothing fancy. I just give my users a menu option to do autochecks and reloads, and I count on them to do it (or set up scheduled tasks to do them overnight). Maybe I've been lucky and all my clients happen to have good hardware setups.
I was having an interesting conversation the other day with a consultant friend of mine. He and I have totally different styles of programming (when I subcontract for him I have to change my style). My clients have blissfully healthy databases, he gets quite a few calls for speed problems, database corruption. He keeps asking "what do you know that I don't." Here's what I answered, but I have no idea if this has any basis in fact. If you compared my startup program to his startup program, I generally have one rbase.dat file, and at the end it will bring up the main menu. If you were to trace his startup program, however, you would be running 5 to 10 subroutines (actual external files) before you finally get to the main menu. I don't mind having one program that has 1000 lines of code if it is structured easy enough to read. He wants a program to fit on one edit screen so one program runs another, which runs another, then back to the first, then runs another, etc... My directory might have 50 programs in it (before we started embedding code in forms), whereas his would probably have 400 programs for the same app. I do, however, make extensive use of code stored in tables for code that is shared between different programs. And I also now store all my code in the forms, whereas he refuses to do so. Another difference -- if I want to put up a choose list with 2 options, like "Search by Seller,Search by Buyer", I would hard code that into the choose list. He would put the options in a table. So I guess what I'm saying -- my programming style is to minimize disk and database access, at the risk maybe of being less "modular". Does the fact that his apps are going to the disk many times to load and run program files make a difference in database integrity? I don't know.... Bringing up program files from disk shouldn't have anything to do with the health of a database. I AM making alot less database hits than he does in terms of him embedding menu options in database tables. Anyway, just food for a Friday discussion if anyone is bored. Unfortunately I'm leaving in a few for a funeral so won't be able to partake in a discussion that I might have started!!! Karen > I am always trying to learn so tell me what tools you use for maintenance > of the databases? > > James Belisle > > >
