Re: SQL vs native access (was: Record name the same as the filename)

> > was stunned to find the sql faster.
>
> This is somewhat apocryphal, or at least incomplete
> enough to be misleading.

I have found that most of us classic RPG folks do not really understand the
SQL side of the universe well enough to make general statements about speed.
Maybe it's been a bad experience for me, but I have had to troubleshoot
plenty of performance issues (multi-million record files are typical).  More
often than not, an SQL statement can scream when the table is small (test/QA
environment), but performance goes right into the dumper when the table is
large (production.)

This can be from the optimiser not having a proper index to work with
(common) or the percentage of records that are selected changes (test
database selects 1% of the file, production selects 30% with the same
statement.)  There are lots of things that change from your environment to
mine, and without a good grasp of how the optimiser works, I don't think we
(as a community) can readily treat SQL performance in the same way we treat
native I/O.

The bottom line (bet you thought I'd never get there!) is that native I/O
always scales in a linear fashion, but SQL might not.
  --buck