Fox Alternative

Hi Martin,

I assume you mean a _free_ alternative. Lots of people on the ProFox list
are using MySQL. (I haven't tried it.)

--
Cindy Winegarden MCSD, Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP
cindy.winegarden@mvps.org, www.cindywinegarden.com

"Smart" <martinlewis@lloydjames.com> wrote in message
news:3f096b31$1@tnews.web.dev-archive.com...
> Can anyone recommend alternatives to Foxpro? We often hit problems with
the
> 2gb file limit and are looking at alternatives.
>
> Does dBase have a similar problem? Can anyone recommend MySQL?

Hi Cindy - thanks for the reply.

No I am not after a free solution - just one that would get us around the
2 gig file limit.

Thanks again

Hi Martin,

If you don't need a free solution then you can add SQL Server and Oracle to
your list of possibilities.

Also, for a pure Fox solution you could do what Val Matison did for the
Chunnel project - he split the tables vertically. This was written up in
FoxPro Advisor: "The Ultimate Power and Speed of VFP - Handling Extremely
Large Data Sets" http://advisor.com/Articles.nsf/aid/MATIV02.

--
Cindy Winegarden MCSD, Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP
cindy.winegarden@mvps.org, www.cindywinegarden.com

"Smart" <martinlewis@lloydjames.com> wrote in message
news:3f098b9f$1@tnews.web.dev-archive.com...
> No I am not after a free solution - just one that would get us around the
> 2 gig file limit.

>What kind of numbers of records are you dealing with? If a database is
>normalized, It needs to be an awful lot to hit the 2GB limit. If you
>really are in that range, look at a client-server solution, with a SQL
>backend and a VFP frontend.
>
>Tamar

-- our line of business means that sometimes we are just passing data through
our systems. By this I mean we recieve it, address enhance it, dedupe it,
the output it for mailing. Therefore we feel (rightly or wrongly?) that something
like SQL server isnt of much use as we have fast turnarounds on data and
we rarely store databases on our servers

-- some of the mailing files we get are over a couple of million records,
and one of the dedupe suppression files is over 10 million records of name
and address data.

Hi Smart, I am in the direct mail business as well, and also have to deal
with some very large files, in terms of the mailing files, these can be split
very easily and a dedupe hierarchy used to pin them back together. As for
suppression files MPS or PAF in the UK are our biggest files with PAF having
over 50 million records, I keep these files in a text format and create lookup
tables to locate and access the data, for example if I wanted to find an
address via the postcode, I have fox table with a unique list of postcodes
and a field containing the byte position of that postcode in the text file,
then use low level string manipulation to extract the data from the text
file.

This can be built into reusable classes very easily and is also very very
fast.

I have never had a problem with the 2gig limit using this approach.

I hope this gets you thinking

Tamar E. Granor <> wrote:
>On 8 Jul 2003 05:03:16 -0700, "Smart" <martinlewis@lloydjames.com>
>wrote:
>
>>-- some of the mailing files we get are over a couple of million records,
>>and one of the dedupe suppression files is over 10 million records of name
>>and address data.
>
>It shouldn't be too hard to structure that data to keep it under the
>2GB limit, then.
>
>Tamar