Array Coolness

[Kay C Lan]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:08 AM, Bob Sneidar <bobs at twft.com> wrote:

> That is a good point. I never envisioned anyone having a table with 1000
> columns! I wonder if the person who made a table that large even remembers
> himself what all the data was for!
>

I was trying to indicate that some columns might contain only a couple of
characters, whilst another might contain 1000s of times more characters, not
that a single table might have a 1000 columns.

You indicated that you were trying to make a FileMaker type application. In
my experience, when dealing with really large amounts of data (several GBs
+) for speed reasons you end up needing to develop a 'Navigation View' and
an 'Inspection View'. The Navigation view only shows enough data (a few
columns) so that you can pinpoint individual records you want to inspect. If
the code were to 'SELECT * FROM table' then removed the unwanted data to
create the Navigation view, it would be slower than just showing All the
columns - a bit counter intuitive if the desire is faster presentation.