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Recently I was called on to take a look at re-writing a corporation application. The application dealt with users and demographic information about them. They were planning to use it for about 10,000 users (a small subset of the total users) with about 300,000 demographic responses.
Their first attempt at writing the app had been in Paradox. They realized they might be in trouble when loading the Paradox tables from the mainframe text files was taking 24+ hours.
The main part of the application consisted of finding users who have demographic answers A and B (it was a little more complicated than that but you get the idea). This processing was taking about 3.5 minutes in Paradox. The application had to do this processing over and over Waiting 3.5 minutes was not going to be a very user-friendly application.
This is where I entered the picture. I assured them that FoxPro could do it much faster and we could easily just run some tests to see just how much faster. Their paraphrased answer was “FoxPro? Isn’t that dead? Besides, we’d really like to do it in Access. We hear that it’s really cool.”l shook my head, calmly explained that FoxPro wasn’t dead, explained that Fox is faster than Access, all to no avail. They wanted to try it out in Access.
So I took the Paradox files back to my office. I attached to them in Access and ran some queries to turn them into Access tables (something Access does very well). I ran a couple test queries and lo and behold Access reduced the 3.5 minute processing down to 29 seconds.
That was quite an improvement and the client was ready to do it in Access but I knew Fox could do better. I convinced them we should test it in Fox.
I converted the Access tables over to Fox tables and ran some sample queries to test it out. Fox could do it in 4 seconds! The client was duly impressed and we did the project in VFP.
This would be a happy ending in itself but it doesn’t stop there. The client got the crazy idea (as they are apt to do) that, if Fox
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At
LA Fox
will be demonstrating Visual MaxFrame 4.0 Beta. During the evening, he will show you the new setup wizard, new security features and how the framework has changed. He will also demonstrate
two
systems written with this framework
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a
workorder tracking system and a highly modified accounting system. He will entertain any questions about the framework as well.
We have also arranged a special developers group discount with the authors of
Visual FoxPro 6 Enterprise Development
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Rod Paddock, John Petersen, and Ron Talmadge
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and will be selling the book for $40 at this meeting. This hardbound book (CD included), normally retailing for $55, contains over 700 pages of useful information and should be a part of any VFP developers library. If you’re anticipating the purchase of this book, we are only accepting cash or check.., no credit cards, please.
October 19, 1998, 6:30 PM, Peter Butterfield. Peter
Butterfield will present an abstract framework which he calls the “Mother of all Frameworks.” in the sense that any event handling/state machine could be modeled as a concrete instantiation of this framework. A central idea to the presentation is that an application framework is only the topmost of many useful frameworks required to make a good VFP application. Other essential frameworks will be demonstrated, including an extensible Wizard framework, a framework for integrating
forms menus
and toolbars, a framework for late-binding
(Con't, page 2)
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The LA Fox Developer
A Newsletter for
FoxPro
Application Developers in Southern California
Visit our WebSite at:
http://www.mesllc.com/lafox.html
September 1998
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Out and About
by Barry R. Lee
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The September meeting of LA Fox will be held on Sept. 21, 1998, at 6:30 PM at our regular meeting place (the Torrance Airport, 3301 Airport Drive, in Torrance). For details on how to get there, see the map on the back page.
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VFE DevCon
New KB Articles
FoxPro
Q &
A
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