Database Performance

[Heyjebbo]

Hello Brendan,

I’m building a database that I expect to have a couple thousand records. Each record will have a photo, so I’m expecting some performance challenges. (I assume a photo taken from iPhone basically “is what it is”, with no “Small/Medium/Large” options.). To mitigate this, I’d like to optimize my other fields as much as possible.

For some of the fields, I have the option of using either multiple checkboxes or a single multi-select pick list. (Example is whether a product has feature A, B, C.) I wonder if you have a sense of whether one or the other design is more scalable / performant.

For my single-value text fields, I can choose to use pick lists (desired) or just free-form data entry. Not sure if binding the pick list makes any significant difference.

The other main consideration is that logically I have products and manufacturers. In practice, most manufacturers only have 1-3 products, so separating these into separate, linked tables doesn’t radically affect size. If we assume that the complexity of normalizing the database (maintaining separate manufacturers table/form) and the duplication of effort of not normalizing it (re-typing manufacturer info) largely offset one another, do you have any sense of which design would perform/scale better in TapForms?

The hardware, if relevant, are iPhone 4 and iPad 2.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Kind Regards,

Jeff

[Heyjebbo]

One additional note – this is for my father’s hobby, so the definition of acceptable performance is not business-class, but more like “tolerable”.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Brendan]

Hello Jeff,

It might depend on how many manufacturers you have as you could just use a sorted pick list to select the manufacturers. But there’s no cascading of pick lists so you wouldn’t just pick a manufacturer and then have another pick list which has only their 1-3 products in it. It sounds like the job of a linked form.

But it’s not really a matter of which design performs better from a pure performance basis, but which design makes it easier to enter and look up information. Pick lists in general all faster for entering in data than linked forms are. So I would suggest just trying it out with a couple different ways to see which one performs better from a usage point of view rather than a database access point of view. With only a few thousand records, Tap Forms will perform very well on the hardware you have.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Author]

Posts