OpenEuphoria

Re: Sequences and long files

• Posted by Irv <irv at ELLIJAY.COM> May 06, 1998
• 670 views

At 09:13 AM 5/7/98 +-900, Michael J. Sabal wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>Sender:       Euphoria Programming for MS-DOS <EUPHORIA at
>MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU>
>Poster:       Michael Sabal <mjs at OSA.ATT.NE.JP>
>Subject:      Sequences and long files
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>A couple weeks ago, someone posted a question about how to handle =
>super-huge database files
<snip>
, changes would be kept in =
>the second database file, a much smaller file whose access time is =
>miniscule.  Then, during an idle time like waiting for user input, copy =
>the changes file into the main database file and save the whole thing.  =
>This means adding a time check in the wait_for_input routine for like 3 =
>minutes, but only if the change file exists.
>
>Hence, variable length records, mostly rapid access time, and not too =
>difficult to program, I would think.

This idea would work. There is a difficulty with this, however.
If something goes wrong before or while the sequence is
written to disk, you've lost a LOT of data.
Writing one record at a time sort of cuts down on the
damage you can do.

There's also the problem of Euphoria's native sequence
format: a 300 meg data file would probably take 2 or 3
times that much disk space.
If s = {"Now is the time",123}, -- 20 bytes more or less --
it takes 63 bytes to store on disk with a print(fn,s)

Irv