Tony, thanks. Your posts are very helpful to me. I never said anything about
designing some application that depends upon bringing over a million rows.
I just want to play around with Postgresql on windows, at home, and see what
happens if I load in a million rows. Supposedly, from my readings, there are
PG databases with 4 terabytes. They must have a lot of rows in some of those
tables. I just want to see if Postgresql will function ok when I load
something of some size. As for Rekall and Access, they offer an out of the box
table browse when you click on a table. But, it will blow up if the table has
250,000 rows, in the case of Rekall. I am just curious to see what happens
when I do certain things, and my curiosity paid off, because I learned
something about a design limitation in Rekall.
If I were designing some kind of application for real life, of course I
would want to limit the amount of info that a user brings across in a query, and
not give them a million rows in a combobox. Give me some credit. I am not an
utter moron.
But there are in theory databases with tables that have millions of rows,
and in theory, one must occasionally issue an SQL command to be performed on the
server side that will process all those rows.
I am certain that Postgresql is rock solid on Unix/Linux, but who knows what
the Windows version is like, unless I play around with it. And I should be
able to write a program in Liberty Basic, for example, to produce large scripts
of test data, to load in with isql. And I should be able to export those
large test tables too. And it should work as advertised, and not blow up. But I
wont know unless I try it out.
Actually, what I am trying to do right now is learn enough of either VBA (if
I am going to work with Access) or Python (if I am going to work with
Rekall) so that I can create a form which would deal with several tables, where my
code would control what gets fetched and displayed, and limited to a small a
number of rows as possible to accomplish whatever is necessary. I just
want to learn a little SQL before I die, having come from an RPG COBOL Dbase
world a long time ago.
As much as I dislike the evil empire of Microsoft, there are tons of books
and forums on VBA and Access, which is a distinct advantage.
I had downloaded a version of Python for windows, and all it seemed to do
was run inside a small DOS like window. Now, I see with Rekall, that it uses
Python but runs in Windows, and not in a DOS terminal window. This weekend, I
want to examine the Help tutorial that comes with Rekall, to see if I can
find out how to write my own code to perform SQL queries and process the rows
returned. The does not seem to be a lot in the search engines as far as
tutorials or code examples. A lot more seems to be available for VBA. I do notice
that Rekall will allow you to save the forms to a folder. And when I look at
those forms in an editor, it seems to be the Python code. So perhaps I can
learn something from studying the code in those forms which Rekall produces.
I guess I would like it better if I could gain some proficiency in Rekall
and Python, since it would free me from the M$ world of Access and VBA. The
two companies that produce Rekall seem a bit odd to me right now, and raise
some doubts in my mind about the future of the product, but I like what I see in
the demo so far.
I would just like to find a free, or low cost basic like language that would
let easily paint GUI forms in some IDE, and then easily add my own script to
interact with the Postgresql database. Such an a development environment, and
such tutorials should be very common and easily accessible, since a sql
engine is not much use unless you can access it.
Probably Powerbasic or Realbasic would do what I want, and I would feel
comfortable with them, but they are rather expensive.
Anyway, thanks everyone for your tips and advice.