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The
L A Fox
Developer Newsletter
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June
1994
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Special Announcement....
July brings a very special guest to Southern California.
Les Pinter, author of numerous books on
FoxPro
techniques and programming/development strategies, as well as
The Pinter FoxPro Letterand
contributing writer to many national publications, will be the featured speaker at the July meeting. He’s offerred to speak on a variety of subjects from his current favorite, Rapid Prototyping, to “writing your own browse” and “writing spreadsheets in
FoxPro”,
or a subject of our choosing.
PLEASE NOTE !! Because of scheduling coordination with the Orange County MS FoxPro Developers Group,
the July meeting date of LA Fox has
been changed to July 12. 1994
. Please mark this new date on your calendars. Regular “third Tuesday” meetings will resume in August. Because of the expected crowd, we would advise arriving early.
LA
Fox President’s Column
(Con't from P. 2)
fields, filtered indexes with For clause, unique indexes). As in the Goley treatment, he includes a section which compares different search strategies in different data situations. Bob Grommes, in his book Inside FoxPro 2.5 for Windows, offers a different and very thoughtful treatment on programming for speed in Chapter 12, a good treatment of indexing and searching in Chapters 6 and 7, and a thorough treatment of SQL and Rushmore in Chapters 27 and 29. And Lisa Slater describes Rushmore in Chapter 7 and has some interesting thoughts on optimization in appendix B. As you can tell, this a topic with many aspects, that can’t be reduced to a few pat answers.
And don’t forget there are many other factors in a complex application that can affect the user’s perception of performance. Most notable is the slowness in redrawing screens in a GUI environment like Windows or Macintosh. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if the DBMS was blazingly fast in recovering the answer, if it takes the presentation program several seconds to display the answer.
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For a good treatment on this topic, look for Alan Schwartz’ article in the May FoxPro advisor magazine, where he presents techniques for clever use of the Show Get command to minimize repainting delays. Your design for locking and concurrency control can prevent response delays that make your application appear sluggish in a high traffic situation with many users trying to query and update the data files at the same time. Careful design of your SQL Select statements to avoid many-table joins and Distinct clauses, can make a huge difference in response time.
In summary, achieving good performance in a complex application is anything but automatic. It requires expertise gained by experience and in part by listening to people like Perry who have been there
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thanks for sharing with us, Perry.
Interest in FoxPro version 3.0 continues to build, especially with the apparent imminent release of Borland’s dBase for Windows. I was in Redmond last week and talked to several of the FoxPro team. Nothing is in concrete yet, but the situation taking shape is
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Devcon in January in San Diego. The team is excited and optimistic about 3.0 but obviously non-commital this far out about release date. One could guess that they would expect to have 3.0 released or very close by the time of Devcon
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that’s my guess, not anything from the horses mouth.
Mark this one on your calendar for two reasons
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Les Pinter will be our guest speaker
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and the meeting is on Tuesday, July 12, which is earlier than our standard “third Tuesday” schedule. Les is well known in the FoxPro community for his knowledge and his wit. He has published a long standing, regular newsletter, The Pinter FoxPro Letter, is a regular columnist for Pinnacle’s FoxTalk newsletter, and has appeared in many other national publications and conferences. This should be a fun meeting
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don’t miss it.
Announcements
If you want classroom training, The Information Management Group offers a series of multi-day FoxPro courses focused on the Power Tools
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which will be held in Los Angeles in July. I have a brochure with course descriptions and dates. You can register at (800) 922-2019. They also offer two Advanced FoxPro development courses but you have to go to Chicago (the city in Illinois) for those.
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