On 23 Sep 98, at 19:08, Susan Duncan wrote:
> 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,
> 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
> 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.
I think both opinions have merit. I myself much prefer using a
database. And I think Susan makes a good defense of the Access
database.
But I recently wrote a lookup for a database. The initial database
was 24 meg as delivered. It was that because of fixed field lengths.
The previous company had it run through a MS SQL server. But this
company could not convert some bizarre date string into something
readable by a human (it was backwards and there were no separators
between the numbers). I thought it was the oddest thing in the world.
Here was this major corporation with an IT department and a "world-
class" hosting company and neither one of them knew what to do about
the date. Well I took the 24 meg database and reduced it to 8 meg. I
converted the date (to show as numbers or names). I then broke it up
into 50 separate files because a search had to include one and only
one state. It was all perl and flat-file and it was as fast as the
MS SQL or at least appeared to be. Now I would put it in mSQL but at
the time I was doing everything in flat-file. I much prefer
databases.
Peter
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