Re: Reliability of small database system
- Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Sep 30, 2013
- 5473 views
Hi
My eyes widened in horror!
You are sooooooo much more likely to get database corruption if you allow humans (cough splut) to edit it. Use eu to error check all the entries, so that users can't input stupid stuff.
If your major worry is computer crashing, and database corruption, then you either need military grade hardware, or nasa level shielding. If you want pretty secure easy to use data storage, then use sqlite, and as Jim says write it out to a text file.
To put the data security into context, my vet database has been running since 2000 (thats right 2000 AD), has gone through various eu upgrades, and a few sqlite versions, and I have not once lost any data through computer crashes (and there have been a few ranging from power cuts, and lightning strikes, and just odd glitches - hard drive failures have meant a quick restore of the entire system, but again, with no data loss apart from between the last backup and the failure.). I do back up in 3 separate locations (thats just sensible business practice though), and I am quite comfortable that if I have a data problem, I will be able to restore from any of the 3 working backups, and have lost no more than a days records.
There are even more robust database systems, but for the level of simplicity vs level of integrity in my own (evangelic) opinion, you can't beat sqlite.
Chris
