Re: RDS vs Compiled?

June Tong wrote: > > Douglas Wilson (dgwilson@gte.net) wrote: > : I've just experienced this trying to debug compiled code. When I > : used RDS it actually went faster. I also got better error messages > : since the problem was an array index going out of bounds, and the > : compiled version does not report that sort of error (yes, it was > : bad programming that it wasn't being checked in the program, but > : that's the way it was), > > It's been a while since I wrote any 4GL, and I don't seem to have any 4GL > manuals to hand, but isn't there a -a flag that does array checking? > > : The compiled code might be faster in some cases, but I haven't seen > : yet where its significantly faster, since the SQL is the slowest > : part of the program, and is the same speed in both. > > I believe that RDS can be faster if you don't PREPARE your SQL statements, > because it basically prepares them for you. Obviously you can eliminate > this advantage by PREPARE'ing your statements yourself. If the code does no significant processing or is mainly screen based then RDS and compile 4GL are comparable. However, do anything significant and RDS -vs- compiled is worse than compiled 4GL -vs- "C". Keep in mind that reports do significant processing under the hood just to write the report so these are most dramatically effected. (I had one report once that took 2hrs in RDS and 15 minutes compiled.) Art S. Kagel