Re: Oracle and PICK

"Tony" <andrewst_at_onetel.net.uk> wrote in message news:c0e3f26e.0404170953.cf441f0_at_posting.google.com...
> ross_at_stamina.com.au (Ross Ferris) wrote in message
news:<26f6cd63.0404170656.72605341_at_posting.google.com>...
>
> This is logical/physical confusion. The fact that invoice headers and
> lines logically reside in 2 separate tables does not mean that they
> may not physically reside together on disk for performance reasons.
> Oracle, for example, allows 2 or more tables to be physically
> "clustered" together by key values.

I think you missed something here. Within Pick it is possible to have the all header and all detail lines reside in the same physical record on disk! Now I'm not saying that this is a smart idea all the time. But in many instances it can be a good idea. Then one single record is read from the database and containing most to all the information required.

One situation, that comes to mind, may be an invoice structure.

The invoice information, billing, ship-to, and all order lines containing, part numbers, quantity for each part, cost at invoice time, retail amount billed at invoice time etc. Read such a record and most of the required information is already read. There is no need to look up into a invoice-line number table to retrieve all the invoice line information. In Pick all that may be left to do is to look into the parts inventory table to retrieve a description. Heck, even the description at the time if invoicing may want to be saved just in case the powers that be insist on recreating the invoice exactly at some later date.

Doing such thing in the proper way can may Pick extremely fast, and minimize that amount of disk space required to house all the data.

Gee, when disk space was expensive, and a 100 megabyte hard drive was considered large, I converted a company from a relational (not Oracle) database accounting system to a Pick accounting system. The company could not hold a full month of data on the hard drive, but after conversion to the Pick accounting system I installed, the company had close to have the hard drive left for new data.

In this company's case, the TCO for the relational accounting system would have required extra hardware to be added to the cost to compete with a Pick solution.

Regards,

Dale Received on Tue Apr 20 2004 - 02:02:57 CEST