Re: FoxPro vs. Informix

In article <thatcher.10.2F4BA2FC@edge.ercnet.com> thatcher@edge.ercnet.com (Tom Hatcher ) writes: >Could anyone help explain why Foxpro running on a Pentium base PC is able >to populate a 40MB database in 1 minute and it takes Informix 6.0 running on a >dual processor Spark 1000 server 10 minutes? > >Thanks >Tim H. > I bet I could write a C program that could beat Foxpro :) While I can't explain the speed difference, you need to keep in mind that Fox isn't doing any of the transaction processing/logging that Informix is, nor is it running a server process to control database access. Speed isn't everything. If you don't believe me, try running an update statement on a table with over a million rows and kill the power to the computer in the middle. I'll bet that the Fox database is totally hosed. Load speed is only one factor and unless you're doing this all the time I wouldn't get too excited. Security, robustness and speed of query resolution are 3 considerations that, off the top of my head, I'd put ahead of load speed in choosing a database. (I actually did this to a Paradox DB just to demonstrate its fragility. It died horribly. Foxpro isn't any better; any program can write to the files!)