Capabilities: RTF editing, Graphs, flat-file database

[Geoff Caplan]

Hi folks,

Thanks for the responses.

Trevor DeVore wrote:

>> I'm curious as to why you think Valentina is unreliable?  It has been
>> excellent in my experience with it.  You just install the database
>> files when you install the program and the user doesn't have to do
>> anything else.  There are externals for Mac and Windows which are
>> already available and it offers great searching capabilities.

Simply on the basis that as a full-featured RDBMS it is a very complex
bit of kit and vastly over-specified for this particular requirement.
And Paradigma don't promote it as an embedded engine on their website:
they focus on the speed. Paradigma themselves say that data corruption
can occur if the host computer crashes:

http://www.paradigmasoft.com/faq/kernel.html#safe_data

Crashing is a not-unusual occurrence on Windoze! An RDBMS designed for
embedded use would use a technique such as journaling to self-recover
from such a crash.

Mark Wieder wrote:

>> Lemme beat Rob to the punch here and say... look into sdb. That will
>> give you your flat-file database in pure Transcript, so it's cross
>> platform from the start.

Could well be the answer - I'll certainly give it a try. Does anyone
know where sdb lives? The link on runrev.com appears to be out of
date...

Sarah Reichelt wrote:

>> Another very popular way is to use a single data field with one line
>> per record, and each field in the record separated by some delimiter,
>> usually tab. The whole field can be loaded into memory allowing very
>> fast searching, sorting etc.

Sarah, can you point me to the Rev functions you would use for this?
Sounds like you are saying that Rev has Awk-like capabilities. This
has the merit of simplicity. But with up to 60,000 records, I would
have to test the speed and memory issues.

>> Also, you might want to consider XML which saves your data externally
>> in a file that can be read by many applications, but uses Rev's fast
>> XML library for searching, editing etc.

I don't need data portability, so the case for XML seems weak in my
own scenario. I know some people are using XML/XPath as a data engine,
but I'd prefer something built for the job.

------------------ 
Geoff Caplan
Vario Software Ltd
(+44) 121-515 1154