Valentina Database News

Our engineers have developed  new REINDEXing algorithms for Valentina that could increase reindexing speed by over a multiple of 100.

On a G 5 Dual Processor, 2 Ghz Mac, a five million record reindexing takes over 10 minutes. With the new algorithms, the same reindexing takes between 6-9 seconds.

A secondary benefit is that the size of the index file is reduced in half. A reduced index size means not only making better use of available space on read only media (CDROM, DVDROM) but also an increase in indexing speed since the kernel has to spend less time working with the index file.

An example - a customer database with tables that have 10 and 20 million records each. For ULONG fields:

10M records table

• old index = 240MB
• new index = 120MB

20M records table

• old index = 480MB
• new index = 240MB

The advancements can be demonstrated on numeric fields <=4 bytes. i.e. Byte, Short, Ushort, Medium, Medium, Long, ULong, Float, Date, Time.

The Paradigma R&D team is researching the creation of a similar algorithm for string fields. You can test the new reindexing algorithms in the next beta release of Valentina 2.4.

VInstaller 1.0 is a helper utility to simplify the creation of Mach-O applications for Mac OS X that use Valentina 2.x or later. When you create a Mach-O application with REALbasic, you need to insert the VComponents libraries into the application package after the build is complete. VInstaller makes this a one step process.

Installing the VComponents folder is a very easy thing to do manually, but becomes a pain in the rear end since it is tedious to open up the application package and navigate to the “Contents” folder and then copy the VComponents folder to that location. Also, if you infrequently build a final application for distribution or testing, it is easy to accidently install the wrong VComponents folder (i.e., the one for carbon builds) and spend time trying to figure out why your application is crashing. VInstaller turns this into a one step “no brainer” operation.

System Requirements:

Mac OS X 10.2 or later

VInstaller is free from True North Software.

Paradigma Software is updating Valentina for Revolution to increase compatibility with Revolution 2.x. This release includes the following features:

• Support for RevDB. Now it is possible to use RevDB exactly like any other supported database (such as Valentina XCMD 1.11)
• Installer for Revolution Stack. A new stack that eases installing Valentina 2.x. This removes the tedium of having to manually set up the external.
• Test Project.  A new test project which automates testing each feature of Valentina 2.x for Revolution.
• RevDB API Bridge. Use the RevDB API yet still have access to direct calls to Valentina (to access the many advanced features of Valentina that cannot otherwise be exposed through query builder).
• Explain Feature. A new kernel feature can optionally allow each SQL query to be written to a log to help diagnose your database solution.

Several other new features are in the works.