From: viking@iastate.edu (Dan Sorenson)
Subject: Re: picking between FoxPro and Paradox
Keywords: help
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 04:32:09 GMT

	Is anybody making a FAQ for this group?  This seems like a fairly
common question, so I'll post it.

hh2x@crux3.cit.cornell.edu (Danish) writes:

>We want to buy a database so that we
>can perform some more standard manipulations on our output data. The main
>thing is sorting the data quickly on any field. Which program -- Foxpro or
>Paradox, or is there something faster I haven't heard of yet-- is faster
>when sorting huge data files up to 150 meg?

	I've tested FoxPro/LAN on files of nearly a gigabyte in size (had
to fill the server's hard drive and test for data integrity myself before
I'd let Novell do it for me.  I'm strange that way).  It seems to do the
trick.  Speed is dependent mainly upon how fast your drives are and how
much EMS memory you have available.  A 6500-record sort on a 50-char
field will take roughly 15 seconds on a 386/25 with 490K free and an old
ESDI drive at ~20ms access time.  The thing to do, of course, is to write
a .prg (xBase language program, similar to a Unix shell script but with
loads of extentions and it is compiled) and let your machine do this during
the lunch break or overnight.

	Recent DBMS Advisor articles indicate Paradox 4.0 (?) is a bit
faster than Fox in some operations.  Personally, I'd be leery unless I
knew what dataset was being worked, how it was being manupulated, and
what platform it was on.  Benchmarks and real life are often different,
especially when the benchmark is used for an advertisement.

>If Foxpro and Paradox are equal in this respect, then it would be helpful
>to know which one is easier to manipulate. Half of us are c programmers who
>could get by either way, but the other half might be aided by an easier
>interface... which program makes this easier to provide?

	Having never seen Paradox, I can't compare Fox to it.  However, do
any of you have FORTRAN experience?  Take out the implied DO's and that's
roughly what xBase is like.  In short, easy to write, read, and learn,
with loads of extentions for you to play with as you need.  Most of your
common statistical functions are covered by the CALCULATE command, and
virtually all things can be done from a menu system.  One nice thing that
keeps users off my back is the <verify> button, which verifies that the
conditions for calculation that you have chosen do indeed make a valid
statement.  That statement appears in the command window, so it's a simple
cut-and-paste to place it in a .prg for use in some canned routine.  The
on-line help menu (the manual, essentially, cross-referenced and can be
called by context.  Ex: help update shows the update reference and will
show any cross-references under the See Also menu) is a great boon to
productivity as well.

	Let me put it this way: I'll be graduating next December.  This
spring we'll hire a replacement.  Within four months I intend to have
this guy supporting roughly three megabytes of source code, 300 megs of
critical data, and a Novell 3.11 network.  This replacement will likely
be a farm kid with a whole semester of Pascal or maybe Fortran under
his belt and a working knowledge of MS-DOS.  It's a realizable goal
with Foxpro, because it's that simple to use and learn.

	Now then, if some nice Paradox user would give his/her side of the
story, we'll be well on our way to getting that FAQ entry written.  Perhaps
some Paradox user would like to try a few comparisons against Fox?  I'd
be happy to ftp any datasets and a list of operations to clock from somebody
and work out routines to do these and record the times automatically.
Perhaps we might use Danish's dataset as a real-world example, among others?

	And no, I'm not at all affilliated with Fox.  In fact, the programs
we distribute using Fox and the Developers Kit have no royalties going to
me.  I'm just a rather satisfied customer and interested in the comparison.

< Dan Sorenson, DoD #1066 z1dan@exnet.iastate.edu viking@iastate.edu >
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