[plt-scheme] cross platform data persistence

Hello!

On Tue, 20 May 2003, Rohan Nicholls wrote:

> I am implementing a herbal database in scheme for a friend who is a
> naturopathic doctor, not very complex and probably no more than 10 000
> entries.
>
> I have been thinking about how to store the data on disk, and the
> problem is that my friend uses MacOS9, might move in the future to
> MacOSX, and I prefer to develop on Linux, while some of her colleagues
> use Windows, so that should be a supportable option.
>
> At the moment I have come up with a fairly unixy file format for storing
> the data and then keeping a few indexes to speed up searches.
>
> Another option is to use xml, the only problem with this is speed
> although maybe I shouldn't be worrying about this.

I'm using SXML and SXPath for the applications like this.

SXML may be "parsed" fast (by 'read'), and may be considered
as an effective and portable storage format for XML data.

SXPath may be used as a query language.

> Other issues are
> whether to keep every record in a seperate file and store the files on a
> file system with folders for different letters of the alphabet, or
> different groups of id numbers, or to have one semi-enormous file.
>
It depends on a file system used:

ReiserFS is especially good for a lot of small files,
raw partition - for an enormous file.

An application which effectively runs on Reiser will probably die on vfat...

Best regards,
         Kirill.