From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Jan 13 9:25: 8 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from clmboh1-smtp2.columbus.rr.com (clmboh1-smtp2.columbus.rr.com [65.24.0.111]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 42D1437B402 for ; Sat, 13 Jan 2001 09:24:50 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.iowna.com (dhcp065-024-023-038.columbus.rr.com [65.24.23.38]) by clmboh1-smtp2.columbus.rr.com (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id f0DHMSp17496; Sat, 13 Jan 2001 12:22:28 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3A608E88.1D6D1250@mail.iowna.com> Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 12:21:12 -0500 From: Bill Moran X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jonathon McKitrick Cc: Danny , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: good text based word processor, database question, and freebsd-uk References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jonathon McKitrick wrote: > Installing is the easy part. My question is: > Is it worth the trouble to set up a DBMS to keep track of ascii text tips, > or does it make sense to just use a flat text file?B You're probably asking the great-grandaddy of unanswerable questions. Is it worth it? Of course, an SQL database is going to be considerably faster than a flat file on non-linear lookups, as well as random-access type maintenance (i.e. delete a record here, edit one there, etc) Plus, you could get very cute with techniques for searching on keywords, etc. The biggest question that will justify doing a DB (I think) will be how big do you expect it to get. With a few hundred tips on a decent powered machine, you should see no performance problem with a flat file, but with hundreds-of-thousands of records, complicated search techniques, or hundreds of simultaneous users, you're definately going to see a benefit to a RDB. Also, I think it will be easier to write a nice front-end if you've already got a well-planned DB back-end. Depending on your user-base, however, a nice front-end might be overkill. It's dependent on these facters and possibly others. -Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message