Thank you very much for this, Bart. Your comments directly address many
of my concerns. I'll be following this up with some more specific
questions under a new subject.
----- Original Message -----
From: Bart Lateur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 2:47 AM
Subject: Re: Newbie looking for resources
> On Tue, 29 May 2001 09:06:50 -0700, Will W wrote:
>
> >I need this to be compact enough
> >for fast downloads and free of any proprietary code (it will be
freeware
> >available over the net). I have identified DBI:CSV as one possible
> >approach.
>
> I personally wouldn't use XML or CSV. Why not? Lack of efficiency. All
> the data needs to be read from the file before you can do anything
with
> it. Since you're planning to have a user interface, you probably will
> have a long-running script, so it might not really matter.
>
> >Are there any options other than CSV that are widely available
> >on end-user machines? For instance, can I expect that ODBC or ADO
will
> >work on most Windows platforms?
>
> But then, you still need an underlying database engine.
>
> >From what I gathered, MSIE5.x uses Jet for itself, so in this case,
if
> people have that browser, they'll probably will have the database
> engine, too, I suppose.
>
> You might incorporate support for MySQL, but in such a way that people
> will have to download MySQL themselves. Your program would then be
> nothing but a front-end to MySQL. It wouldn't be the only one (see the
> "contrib" page at MySQL's website for the competition). Your edge
could
> then be that you provide a toolkit for easily making customised
database
> front-ends, not a generic database interface. RAD for DB, so to say.
>
> --
> Bart.
>
