Best modality for rather large stacks

Gordon Tillman got at mindspring.com
Fri Dec 16 14:26:02 EST 2005


Howdy Fred,


On Dec 16, 2005, at 13:18, FMoyer at aol.com wrote:

> Hi:
>
> I have to port a bunch of Hypercard Stacks over to Revolution. A  
> typical
> stack contains 5000 cards with one background and about 50 fields.  
> While these are
> not huge stacks, they are big enough where if I simply port them as  
> they are
> to Revolution, searches will be glacially slow. I need to be able  
> to search
> quickly and see different views of the material. For example, one  
> of the stacks
> is my address stack. Most of the time I just need to find a  
> person's name; at
> other times, I need to see a list of everyone with a certain zip  
> code, or a
> list of those who responded to a mailing, etc.
>
> Can anyone advise on the best mode? At the moment I am inclined to  
> create a
> one-card stack that links to a text file. In the text file, one  
> line of text
> would contain all of the data for one card. So to "go" to card 533  
> the computer
> would simply read line 533 of the text file, parse it, and set up  
> the data
> onto the fields.   This method seems really good as searches are  
> very fast using
> "lineoffset", and if things get fouled up I can simply open the  
> text file in
> any word-processor and fix it. I also like the fact that I don't  
> have to
> continually save the stack -- in my script the text file would be  
> continually
> updated as fields are changed, cards created/deleted.


I would recommend that you use the altSQLite external from http:// 
www.altuit.com/webs/hemingway/AltuitCover/default.htm.

This external is a wrapper around the excellent SQLite database  
engine.  You can read more about SQLite here:

http://sqlite.org/

Works very well, is extremely fast, and can handle even much larger  
databases that what you are needing.  Plus it is less expensive than  
than the Valentina route.  The database file is also fully cross- 
platform.

Regards,

Gordon Tillman





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