Flutterby™! : Dan taught me

A long long time ago, Dan and I built a system for providing property tax information and we provided it online using TBBS and it's xBase/dBase tools. We would read gobs and gobs of data, and pre-process it and index it. I remember this taking all night or longer on a 486. Then we could display things as they wanted it, quickly and efficiently as the information was in the desired format. It's a simple technique. Effective. I'm now using it for other things, and comparing my techniques and code to much more expensive and bigger systems that run intensive for/while queries for many things. We "normalize" the data as we collect it, constantly. It takes a couple of extra queries and inserts for every data acquisition point. It takes big flat tables with some redundant fields that technically would not be properly normalized.

But damn, it's fast to display and analyze data when it's preprocessed.

Thanks Dan. and then there is a story about a web browser written in dBase, but that is another story...