helen@cup.portal.com (Helen C OBoyle) (01/21/89)
Hi.... I'm working on the design of an application to be run under Ultrix on Vaxen of assorted sizes. It will be a distributed system of sorts, but a distributed database is not positively required, because the inter-node updates consist mostly of "rolling up" information from local sites to the central site's summary files. Because of the necessity to organize the information in many different sort orders for reporting (some ad hoc, some scheduled weekly, monthly, etc.), I'm looking at the idea of an RDBMS (to do the work I'm used to doing for myself, because I don't have time to do it :-). Ideally, the database would have some sort of application-generation system built in (forms design and report writing is mostly what I mean here). The users I work with are very particular about report layouts, so the report writing capability should include as much direct control of page layout as possible. As if this were not already a tall order, the database also has to support large files. One file will probably have 600,000+ records, a number of others will have 100,000+. The one with 600,000 records requires updating one or two records about 2000 times daily (within a power of 10 :-). Another of the 100,000+ files will be added to about 2500 times daily (same disclaimer) Given all this.... Do I *dare* attempt use of a relational database? Know any that definitely won't handle it (or are just bad products altogether)? Know any that WILL ??? Sigh, the things we do for users who want on-demand reporting of the entire state of the universe. Helen C. O'Boyle UUCP: sun!portal!helen OR killer!gern.root DOMAIN:helen@cup.portal.com BELL: +1 804 780-2677