Persistence options in standalones

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter Alcibiades wrote:

 > At the moment, the data file in one case is getting to a
 > few tens of thousands of records, and I am seriously worried
 > about robustness if either stored in a stack or exported to
 > a csv file.  Do you all think it right to be worried, or is
 > this just over caution?

CSV is evil, so you have cause to be worried. ;)  If you must export to 
a delimited format, try tab-delimited instead.

As for stack files, just this evening I was working on a project I've 
been with off and on for about a decade, and at its core is a set of 
several thousand custom properties.  Over all this time it's held up 
remarkably well.

The only problem we've ever run into was when Rev added support for 
array notation with custom property sets, and even that wouldn't 
normally have been a problem except that we were using array-like 
notation to address flat data.  A few handler changes later and it was 
all good again, and has been doing well in daily use.

Like anything else with that much important data, make backups often. 
But unlike FileMaker or most other page-from-disk systems, as long as 
RAM will let you do what you need you are unlikely to experience corruption.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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