[Tutor] Best approach to sort data based on several criteria

[Jorge Godoy]

Danny Yoo <dyoo at hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu> writes:

> Hi Jorge,

Hi Danny.

I am also as thankful to you as to Magnus and the other for your
answer.

> Hmmm... When you say "huge amount of data", can you be more
> specific? If you're taking about several megabytes, then we don't
> have much to worry about.  But if we're talking about hundreds of
> megabytes (or even gigabytes), then we have to be a bit more
> careful.

I was talking about 1 or 2 hundreds of mebibytes. 

It means something like 1 or 2 million records (~ 100 bytes / record).

> If your set of data is really humongous, you may want to consider using a
> database management system --- such as PostgreSQL or MySQL --- to do the
> brunt of the sorting and storage grunt work.  Can you give us an estimate
> of how large your dataset's going to be?

It will be bigger than it already is and I ended up using PostgreSQL
and several functions (or stored procedures) to provide a lot of the
analisys I was going to code up if I hadn't used it (statistical
analisys, mainly). 


See you,
-- 
Godoy.     <godoy at metalab.unc.edu>