From: Jamey Cribbs <jcribbs@...>
Date: 2005-05-18T10:29:44+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] KirbyBase 2.2

Oliver Cromm wrote:

>So for a start, I plugged KirbyBase in just as a cache - where before, I
>was reading header data from a news server each time, in the new version
>I save the raw data to a KirbyBase, add only recent messages, then read
>the part of the data I want (by date) from the KirbyBase.
>
>  
>
This might be the source of the slowness.  Is this field that you are 
reading by date defined as a Date field in the KirbyBase table?  If it 
is, this is probably the problem.  As I note in the manual, Ruby's 
Date/DateTime librarys are S-L-O-W!  They really need to be rewritten as 
C libraries.  Every time KirbyBase does a select on a Date field, it has 
to read in each record from the table's physical file and do a Date.new 
on the data.  Like I said, this is slow!

Here is an alternative to try:  define this field in the table as a 
String field instead of a Date field.  Select's will still work pretty 
much the same way because, for example:

    2005-05-25 > 2005-05-24

and

Date.new(2005,05,25) > Date.new(2005,05,24)

are both true.  In other words, Strings formatted similarly to the way 
Date's look compare the same way.

Give this a try and see if you see a speed improvement.  I have tried it 
and have seen dramatic improvements.

Let me know how it goes.

Jamey