[Q] Databases -- Gadfly vs Metakit vs SQLite

[yaipa h.]

Al,

If you are not worried about cross platform, then why not
use the Jet (access) DB. I'm not sure if it comes with 
Office or the OS these days, but it seems to be on just
about every uSoft machine I've looked at lately.  It is 
also dead simple to use.

For info on Access, search c.l.p for 
"Access, DB, [Martelli | Holden | Hammond]"

In some weird coincidence Alex Martelli, Steve Holden and
Mark Hammond each have at least one very good book out on Python. 


Cheers,

-Alan


achrist at easystreet.com wrote in message news:<3E737FA3.51AB478E at easystreet.com>...
> I'm looking for a simple database for a single-user Windows desktop
> application.  The user's data will be text, maybe 10-20 data tables,
> with identifying keys and a few short fields plus plenty of long
> text memo-type fields.  I should like to plan for databases up to
> about 50k rows and 100 MB of data, but the typical will be far less
> than this.
> 
> It looks like Python gives me 3 good choices for this, Gadfly,
> SQLite, Metakit.  I'd like comments that compare and contrast these
> for such an application.
> 
> This is a desktop productivity app, so I'd like to get snappy response,
> no 1 or 2 second delays for a single update or retrieval.  This should
> work to such a standard on a user's 300 MHz, 64 MB Windows machine.  
> 
> Does Gadfly need to fetch the entire database into RAM?  This would be
> fine for me 99% of the time, but I don't want to worry about the user
> with the big database and the small machine.
> 
> Other criteria:
> 
> 1. Very high reliability -- Which of these can give us zero database
> failures from 1000's of users?
> 
> 2. Simple -- We want to hide all details of the database from the
> end-users, and easy to program wouldn't hurt either.  It looks like
> all three will meet this criteria.  Any traps?
> 
> 3. Storage efficiency -- We don't want 10 MB of user data to take 
> 100 MB of disk space.  I know that disk is cheap, but we want the
> data to be easy to back up, send,  and transport.
> 
> The hierarchical non-SQL aspects of Metakit are probably OK.  
> 
> Can anyone with experience with more than one of these advise?
> 
> Thanks much in advance.
> 
> 
> Al