Craig and all,
A new record was added to the price database for every issue last week, this increased the size of the price data file from 47 to 68 meg. This is what's causing the scans to slow down.
I've been testing alterative storage formats, and have come up with a design that will cut your scan times by around 50%.
The original design goal called for a data cd, and the ability to control the amount of data on your hard drive. This may be an admirable goal when the average hard drive is 300 meg, but when 10 gig drives sell for less that $300, it's not so much of a priority.
By getting rid of the data cd and disk buffer, and then creating a file format that is both compact and quick to read, the code was simplified, and the disk i/o optimized much better than before.
The downside to this is that we require about 250 meg on your hard drive. There is no way to reduce the size requirement.
Everything will be faster now, your virtual files will be read faster, the MS files will export faster, the ascii files will export faster and so on.
We should be shipping some cd's out this week to a few people for testing, then we'll start shipping new cd's when it looks good.
I'll be in Houston on Friday at the HAL-PC group Computer Investing SIG. I'll take some cd's with the new database code with me.
I'll also show off our code base for the future - it's an IDE type interface for managing your scan and lists that will make the program a lot more useful for a lot of people.
Quick Scan is being built on this interface, it will use SQL to select out the issues that you request, and then run that list through scan program to get the information that has to be gotten out sequentially. These additions should get a lot of scans into the 5 to 60 second range.
Quick Scan, the Zacks additions, and intraday updates should be out in January.
Thanks for your support,
Gary |
