New year, new version

[Anonymous]

Hello

I update My Tap Forms in new version 2.00. I see a new item “maintenance”. That’s new ?

Thank’s

[Brendan]

Hello Bidule,

The Database Maintenance things are just some SQLite maintenance tasks you can perform. For example, if your database file starts getting large because you’ve deleted and added and deleted and added records a lot, then doing a Vacuum will shrink the size of the database file. This will make access to your data a bit faster.

The Analyze database function is the same function that gets automatically performed after you import a CSV file when Tap Forms says “Optimizing Form”. That process analyzes the data in your database and optimizes the indexes for faster access. If you ever feel like Tap Forms is taking a while to save a value in a record, try running this one.

The ReIndex function is a brute force way of rebuilding all the indexes in the database. This can also help to improve the speed of things.

The Rebuild Search Index function can be used if you are noticing that searching for a value that you know you’ve typed isn’t coming back in the search.

You will rarely ever have to do any of these procedures, but I thought I’d stick in them in there just in case some people had some troubles or performance issues they wanted to fix themselves.

Thanks,

Brendan

[jazmin]

Hi there,

Whenever I try to use the Vacuum function, Tap Forms crashes and closes. Obviously, the function isn’t crucial to my productivity and ability to use this app (which is one of my favorites, by the way ; ) But thought you might be interested in knowing about the problem.

If it helps,I’m running 4.2.1 on my Touch 2g.

Best,

Jazmin

[Brendan]

Hello Jazmin,

I think this is a memory related issue. How big is your database? I’ve had no troubles using this function on my iPhone 4, but on older devices with less memory and large databases, it can run out of memory running this function. It’s not critical to the operation of the app. It just reduces the size of your database if you’ve done a lot of deleting of records.

Thanks,

Brendan

[jazmin]

Hey Brendan,

Thanks for the reply! My database is 1.7 MB (and my touch is a 16G with 13 GB free).

So as I continue to use this app, will it eventually slow down on me? And, if so, will there be something I can about it (as an alternative to the Vacuum feature)?

[Brendan]

Hello Jazmin,

Hmm… That’s not a very big database and should be able to be vacuumed. I just vacuumed a database on my iPhone 4 that was 3.3 MB and it reduced to 2.6 MB. But still that’s pretty small.

I’ll do some more testing on my iPod touch. I’m not really sure there’s anything I can do about it crashing during a vacuum though as that’s just a single command I send off to the database. But you never know, perhaps there’s something I can tweak to make it work better on a touch.

If you notice any slowdowns, try doing an Analyze. The Vacuum procedure simply reduces the size of the database. However, a smaller database size means the system should be able to access it a bit faster.

Thanks!

Brendan

[jazmin]

Interesting…and good to know. Thank you very much, Brendan! And keep up the great work!

[Author]

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