I currently have a database that has 7 tables made using database desktop. Table types I think are .DB Paradox tables .!? Has a total size of 224 MB. Largest table contains +- 300000 records. Now the problem is I am querying on it and it is a simple query eg. "TheName LIKE 'Robert'". This takes forever 1 minute taking into account that the user will want to query a couple of times per minute.

Problem Source No.1 : I am running the database on , and it will have to run on computers under 500MHz with maximum 64 MB. Not much I can do about that.

Problem Source No.2 : Might be the database or not ? I have no idea. So is there an alternative to the BDE in the same price range that delivers better performance ?

Proble Source No.3 : There are not enough tables. Can a higher relationship count make the database more efficient.

Can anybody give me advice ?
Zapperon
ewu@webmail.co.za

1. your database should be normalized, sometimes this is not possible however, but make it as normailized as possible.
2. use secondary maintained indexes on fields you are searching for, this will speed things up.
3. i've found that running a query is much slower then looping through the records and selecting them yourselve. only use querys, if the selection code of a record grows to big or difficult.

More information is needed. For example, are you using indexes? Have you indexed starting with you least used key? Is the database on a network and accessed by many users over the net? If so, are you locking the database? I have had no problem with even larger databases using Paradox tables; however, I would tend to migrate away from Paradox tables to something like MySQL or PostgreSQL when the tables get up to your size.

Thank you for all your help. I can not create additional indexes as this would make the database to big for my purposes. I have decided that I will now learn MySQL and migrate / move over to it. Does anybody know what the licensing agreement is when distributing it with a commercial application ?

Zapperon
ewu@webmail.co.za