Capabilities: RTF editing, Graphs, flat-file database

[Trevor DeVore]

On Jun 8, 2004, at 2:45 AM, Geoff Caplan wrote:

> 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.

I think labeling Valentina as unreliable is a bit harsh in this case.  
Granted, it may not be what you are looking for in your scenario since 
you would like journaling but the fact that you might get some 
corrupted data given the following (taken from the paradigma site) -

"Corruption of a Valentina database, as for any other database, may 
happen only if a crash occurs at the same time as the database is being 
written to disk. And even then only when writing new information into 
the table or when changing the File Allocation Table (FAT)."

doesn't make Valentina unreliable in my opinion.  It just means you 
would have to handle creating occasional backups that could be restored 
from if a crash occurred.


-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com