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Old 12-03-2003, 03:32 PM
Bob Betts
 
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Default tracking Magazine articles


wrote:
Mick Fournier wrote:
I would find out what these guys use
http://los.lon.imag.net/picref.asp

whatever they use may be a bit more powerful than what I need. Man they
have quite a list of source material to go through. quite impressive!
But I did ask asnyway.


Mike, thanks for the compliment. Both because you think my effort is
worth using as a model and because you used the term guys (as in there
is so much data it must be a team effort). Actually it is just one
guy - me - sitting here in the basement at my keyboard manually
turning each page of the new book and typing in the data.

Karen, you have available exactly what I use if you have MS Access and
a simple text editor.

What I am about to say will put a smile on the face of the technically
challenged and horrify the technocrats in our group.

Even though I have been a systems analyst and programmer with major
companies like IBM, Lucent Technologies, and Avaya for over 32 years,
I still keep it simple.

All of the data is entered by me typing it into an ancient DOS editor
that never even made it to product status. It was a prototype written
and used internally at IBM where I worked years ago.

Ten years of the Orchid Digest information was scanned from their five
year indexes and sent to me by a friend. I still had to play with
what she sent to get it into the same fixed field format that I use in
the text file. Every other entry was hand typed by me alone.

I use the old DOS editor because I have used it so long I don't have
to think about what I am doing and can enter the data pretty quickly.
In fact I can do it many times faster than typing it directly into
Access or using a newer editor. I do not have to type every character
on every line. I make a copy of the previous entry and type the next
plant name and page number. I do not have to type the book name every
time. I also only type the various codes if they change from one
entry to the next. However, I am limited to about 2000 entries before
it dies because of lack of memory.

After I have entered enough new data to make it worthwhile to upload a
new version of the database which is created by merging the old flat
file with the flat files of new data (5 to 10 thousand records in up
to 5 separate 2000 record files). I open the main file and all the
files of new data with ultraedit.
I cut and paste the data from the new data files into the main one and
use ultraedit to sort it all on the name field so I don't have to have
the retrieval code do it.

I then open the database, which is in MS Access/97, delete all the
data, and import the new complete text file into Access. I use the
Access data maintenance tool to compress the database and then upload
it to the website.

Since I only have a slow dial-up connection and the database is now
just under 17 megabytes, I do not want to upload it without a good
bunch of new data.

Currently it is one totally un-normalized table. I tried normalizing
it by creating a book name table and referring to it from the main
table but that only cut the file size down by a couple of megs so I
decided to leave it as one table. I think that a large portion of the
physical size is in the indexes since I have them on the plant name
field, the hybrid or species field, the photo or drawing field, and
the colour or black and white field.

If there are any MS Access wizards out there that can tell me how to
make a significant reduction in the file size with what is really one
very simple table, I would love to hear from you. The space for out
club website is donated by my ISP and I keep worrying that when they
see how much space it is using that they may stop being so generous.
If that happens, our club will no longer have a website or the
database. Cutting the file size down will not only save me time
during the upload and allow more frequent updates but it may make my
space usage less noticeable by my ISP.