"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Wednesday, May 17
Caught! On The Horns Of A Dilemma
A programmer-centric post this time, without fucktard-related ranting.
When I was developing my Bleeker Books site, I put together a Visual Basic Script (hereafter VBS) component that extracted data from an Access database, or any database with an OLEDB driver, and wrote it to a richly structured XML document. It did this by opening a new connection a getting the data for each "level" or a document. For example, if you're creating an XML document on an author, his name, date of birth, etc., is in one level, while the list of his books is one level below that.
So the script worked by grabbing lots of little bits of data. And it worked great - until I used it to pull up long lists of books. The list of books itself was one chunk, but each book had a list of authors associated with it, which was another chunk - for each book. So I ended up pulling several hundred data sets out of the database, which takes time.
So I'm recoding this in native Visual Basic (which is faster than VBS), and it's still dog slow. There is an alternative, however - the dot NET framework underlying Visual Basic 2005 lets you pull each set of data once, and then grab the chunks you need. So you read in all the authors, and when you need to get the ones for a particular book, you can do it without making a trip to the database.
So instead of lots of little bits of data, I'm grabbing a few large bits. But if I go that route, I have to read a crapload of data even if I only need one little piece. And I haven't found a way to tell in advance which method will yield better results.
In any case, I'll be through in a couple of weeks and can start using this component to build CrimeSpot 2.0 - a more robust, less error-prone version written on dot NET 2.0.
Mavericks Update. The Mavs play in San Antonio tonight, ahead 3-1 and with a chance to send the Spurs home for the summer. I can see why they're the champs, though. Beating those guys is like pulling teeth. The Spurs don't make many mistakes and they force you to be at the top of your game. But their three top players have all been fighting injuries, especially the great Tim Duncan, who has dominated this series despite a painful foot injury.
Dirk Nowitzki has had a sprained ankle but it doesn't seem to be bothering him. I expect the Mavs to finish off Duncan and company in this game or the next one and move on to the West Finals.
By the way, did you see that the Knicks are thinking about canning Larry Brown after one season and moving Isaiah Thomas from the penthouse to the bench, as the new head coach? Brown is expected to receive between $25 and $40 million dollars to quit. I suspect this is just an expensive way to kick Isaiah downstairs, a temporary stop on his way out the door. The Knicks spent upwards of $150 million this year on salaries and buyouts, and they suuuuucked. Look for this to continue.
