🚀 go-pugleaf

When you use a database you have the benefits of indexing, backup and
restore, fast retrieval, normalization etc etc

Get some trial Databases or Open Source and play around with them for a
while

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"I sense many useless updates in you... Useless updates lead to
defragmentation...  Defragmentation leads to downtime...Downtime leads
to suffering..Defragmentation is the path to the darkside.. DBCC
INDEXDEFRAG and DBCC DBREINDEX are the force...May the force be with
you" -- http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/

"David Lee" <lee@jupiter.mie.uiuc.edu> wrote in message 
news:435e37db@newsgroups.borland.com...
> If there is a better place to ask this let me know.

You might try "borland.public.cppbuilder.database.sqlservers". 
I'm assuming you're using, or going to use, CPP Builder.  But, 
you'll have to provide more information.  See below.

> I'm working on an application which looks like it will have a 
> large amount of data to keep track of and I thought some of 
> these fancy data base components might make this easy.
>
> My program will have a number of sensors to gather data 
> from.(bytes, words, floats, Strings, maybe even jpeg files).

It really depends on what you want to do with the data that has 
been gathered.  If you're just 'logging' things, a file might be 
OK.  If your data can be organized into related tablesyou're 
going to run reports off of it, then you'd be better off with a 
DB.  That's what they're good at.

>
> Currently only the computer running the application will need 
> the data. In the future we might want to make the data 
> available across the internet.

MSDE (I think it's free) is a scaled down version of SQL Server 
2000.  It's meant to be used locally, or even in a client/server 
architecture, but with only a few connections.  It's a good place 
to start.  If/when you need more connections, it can be scaled up 
to SQL Server quite easily.

>
> My real question is at what part do you decide to use a real 
> data base for storing data instead of just dumping it to some 
> file in your own format? How do you go about picking the type 
> of data base to use? What other questions should I ask my self 
> at this point?

I've posed some of those questions above.  We have a real time 
app that can log a lot of information to files.  The log files 
are used when "something bad happens".  We can manually look 
through them.  And, they're pretty simple to implement.  A DB is 
generally used for groups of tables that hold related data, 
including binary (JPG), and allow reports to be generated.  In 
simplest terms, people use a DB to collect data and then produce 
useful, human-readable date from reports.

I'm sorry I couldn't help much, but again, without more 
information, it's difficult to comment.

- Arnie