[fpc-pascal]Databases and FPC

[Rainer Hantsch]

On Tue, 6 May 2003, James Mills wrote:
| > - How many records are assumed to be in the file?
| It's an IRC Services program soon to be a daemon.
| The number of records in the file will grow. For a small irc network,
| perhaps 100-200, it may grow larger in time. If a large network chooses
| to use my program for their large network, then the database may contain
| thousands of records.
So you must be prepared for huge data volumes from the beginning.

| > - What kind of file?
| Currently they are stored as files in a directory "./data". The files
| follow the structure of an INI file which I have written my own code to
| handle.
I would keep in mind that with growing complexity of a file, loading it
will usually also become slower.

| > - Sorted/unsorted file?
| Unsorted. Most recent record addition will always be at the bottom of
| the file.
You have to search for records? Then this is no good choice, because you
always have to read sequentially... Costs a lot of time.

| This is not very good with something that has to be stable. IRC Services for
| instance. If for some reason the program should die unexpectedly then the
| data change in memory will be lost before being written out to disk.

Well, when you keep all changes in memory for hours, this may be true. But
what about "dumping" the memory list to file periodically and (possibly) using
two files alternating? So even if you crash totally, one of the two files is
ok. --> What happens when you use i.e. MySQL as database? This can also crash
and has much more complexity (and therefore risks) as a flat file!

My experiences are: When a process DIES, this nearely always caused by poor
program code. And this often happens when using pointers or when not cleaning
up memory correctly.
But it is much safer to have one "database-daemon" running than having
multiple tasks fiddleing concurrently around in shared files!



mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch

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