On Tuesday 10 February 2009 08:31 am, frankjmat...@gmail.com wrote: > What I'm really looking for is a technical explaination of the correct/ > incorrect way to acheive this... I'm sure it's a problem that someone, > somewhere had to solve once before and I've been trying to reinvent > it, as i said - with separate tables for the columns, column groups, > rows, tables... but in the end - merging all the tables together and > iterating over everything just seems to take forever... not in the > least bit efficient or reliable.
Well, I sort of stand by my original response then. I mean, when you have an unnormalized relational database and responses are too slow, the typical recommendation (I think) is to normalize the database. I won't try to explain that here, you need to look it up. (Maybe someone can explain it (and how to do it) simply, but I can't, at least not at this time.) Normalizing the database is not the only way forward however, and I'd ask how much data you have. For my only (in progress) application, a relational database is just not the right fit, and in general slows everything down (in comparison to plain text files and "ordinary" (and indexed) searches). (My application has plain text files with (currently) up to 5000 variable length records per file, totalling on the order of 10,000,000 characters per file. At them moment I have about 12 such files, although only two are that big. I plan to scale to files as big as 100,000,000 characters without switching to a relational data base (which I'm sure would slow down my application). How much data will you have in this(these) table(s)? For a low quantity of data, maybe even a spreadsheet "technology" would do the job? Other solutions, like a separate machine (server) to handle the database could help as well. I guess someone would need more information, specifically about the quantity of data involved (now and in the future). Randy Kramer -- I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I created a video instead.--with apologies to Cicero, et.al. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
