Proposal: Encouraging DB-using applications

[Guillaume Laurent]

On Monday 22 September 2003 03:45, Daniel Stone wrote:

> So flat files don't always cut it?

Of course not. They do _most of the time_ for a typical desktop usage.

> > Several flat files if you want. Come on, I can find | xargs grep through
> > the 150KLOCs of Rosegarden in seconds. And recipes are fairly short bits
> > of texts, you could probably even load the whole bunch in memory if you
> > really have to.
>
> On a fast box (like my AthlonXP 2400+, for example), sure. On a slower box?
> Good luck.

Yes you can. Try it.

> You're also assuming that people just dump recipes in as flat files. What
> if I want to say "I have trout fillets, bacon, artichoke hearts,
> breadcrumbs, mint, sour cream, lemon, and I want to cook something that
> takes under two hours, all up"?

First of all, I'm not assuming anything, in this particular case I know from 
direct experience (my mother has been in that branch of business for years). 
That use case you made up hardly exists in practice.

Second, yes, you very easily can do that through plain text files, and get 
perfectly decent response times to such a query even on a P90 with 10.000 
recipes. Do the math, at a 2KB per recipe (which is a very generous 
estimation), it's 20Mb to grep through. A P90 will do that in seconds.

> Flat files aren't much use there - you'd need XML to do it in a flat file,

There are other ways to structure data than XML, you know.

> Have a look at some of the
> commercial recipe apps on Windows some day - they're not just a bunch of
> text files.

That doesn't mean it can't be done with just a bunch of text files (something 
which, BTW, no Windows app ever does : it's primarily a cultural problem, not 
an implementation one).

On Monday 22 September 2003 03:36, Daniel Stone wrote:

> "But CPU power is cheap these days" does not hold water, and is
> not a valid excuse. Instead, it should always be taken to expose the real
> underlying reason: lazy developers.

Oh please, spare us the clichés.

-- 
				Guillaume
				http://www.telegraph-road.org