Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> A "few thousand items"? You don't *need* a database. Your data set is
> far too small to justify one. They're expensive, they eat resources,
> they're tough to interface with (if you can), they (usually) take
> training to use. And commercial ones are black boxes: you can't
> reach inside to fix it if it's broken, but instead have to wait
> for support (a bad industry-wide joke) to do it for you.
I could go back to the dark ages and text search the whole thing, but what happens
when it grows? is it going to be fast enough even as it is? how long will it take to
make a custom perl program compared to a cold fusion one? Take a look at
http://www.sportquest.com/ it's a database with about 14,000 records in the main
table, a few hundred in various lookup files stored in an Access database. It works
nicely and I can upscale it if I ever need to. I can even compile the access
database so that when they do download it to print labels or whatever, they don't
even need to buy access. They can also email the whole bunch of them automatically
if they want to. I've got another one that I'm working on (still buggy), but you can
look at the input form for it at http://www.ccisd.ca/english/form.cfm You're gonna
tell me that 5 pages of linked information with multiple occurances should go in a
flat file? I've been programming since '82 everything from cobol on mainframes on
down..databases are more efficient and easier to maintain than flat files.
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