Re: functional, user friendly databases

[Neon John <johngd@bellsouth.net>]

Philip Hypes wrote:
> 
> Okay, I would love to hear from anyone out there in RADSAFE land who knows
> of a good database program that can handle obnoxiously large databases.  A
> research project I'm working on right now involves a system that is
> continuously taking data, approximately once every two seconds.  We are
> currently using Microsoft Access to handle files with as many as 1 million
> data points, with 5-8 readings per entry.  The data files are in the dozens
> of megabytes range, and Access is not handling them well.  It takes forever
> to simply cut and paste a couple of days' worth of data into another
> window.  Granted, this is a tall order, but I hope there is something out
> there that can do better than Access.  Any suggestions?

You think THAT's a big database?  I'll show you big... :-)  Now
seriously, as a programmer, "big" means gigabytes of records.  I
don't use Microsloth products but from what I've seen, I think
Access should handle a database without too much trouble.  I think
what you're running into is the Windoze clip board limitation.  The
clip board, which was originally designed to hold a few lines of
ASCII text, has been bastardized into a crude form of manually
managed shared memory.  It does that rather poorly.  When you cut
your data, somewhere (either in the application or windoze), the
data has to be filtered into an interchange format.  Then when you
paste to the other application, there has to be an on-the-fly
conversion to the specific data format of the receiving program, all
the while, keeping the window nice and pretty.

As a test, and perhaps as an alternative, you might try exporting
the selected data to an interchange format, say CSV, and then
importing it into the new application.  If this runs much faster,
then you know where the bottleneck is.  You could either develop a
macro to automate this or you could move up to a more advanced
database manager.  Any of the "real" programmable database
environments (FoxPro, Informix, etc) should handle this just fine. 
Of course, the REAL solution is to put this application on a Linux
box with a real operating system :-)

> In case curiosity is driving you wild, the system in question measures
> plutonium mass by measuring the heat output from the source (calorimetry).
> It's currently the most most accurate and precise nondestructive assay
> system for plutonium.

Hey, I'll trade you some database programming for some Pu. Enough to
make a couple of nice hand warmers for this winter's hunting season
:-)

John

-- 
John De Armond
johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net
RDS Inc.
Cleveland, TN
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