Many Cards Versus One Card and a List Field

Mark Schonewille m.schonewille at economy-x-talk.com
Sat Jan 5 17:09:16 EST 2008


Hi Gregory,

Sarah is right. Keeping data on individual cards makes Revolution  
extremely slow. A long time ago, I used the bible to create a  
database of approximately 32000 records for a test, i.e. 32000 cards.  
Running the test on a 350Mhz iMac, a search for a string could take  
an hour if this string was on one of the last cards. The same test in  
a HyperCard stack with 32000 cards took a few seconds at most.

If you keep data in a custom property or in a file on disk, you can  
search strings about as fast as with HyperCard. Particularly if you  
have all data in memory and use an offset function or a filter  
command, you can perform searches very quickly.

Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

--

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
http://economy-x-talk.com
http://www.salery.biz

Quickly extract data from your HyperCard stacks with DIFfersifier.  
http://differsifier.economy-x-talk.com


Op 5-jan-2008, om 20:33 heeft Gregory Lypny het volgende geschreven:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm interested in your thoughts on a design question.  Most of my  
> stacks are database-like, and it is as important to be able to  
> access many records resulting from a search as it is to view the  
> individual records one at a time.  So my question is, given the  
> speed of Revolution as compared to good old Hypercard, is there any  
> big advantage to storing data from each record on individual cards  
> as opposed to maintaining, say, a tab-delimited list field that  
> populates a single card with the record's data when that records  
> line in the list field is clicked?  (Is that how Apple's Mail  
> program works?)  Is the use of one card for each record faster?   
> More reliable in some way?  The reason I ask is that even with many  
> cards, I usually need a list field for navigation and searches, and  
> I have to build checks to make sure the data is synchronized  
> between cards and the list field.
>
> Regards,
>
> 	Gregory




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