Thread: Postgresql and VBA vs Python
Tony, thanks. Your posts are very helpful to me. I never said anything about designing some application that depends upon bringing over a million rows. I just want to play around with Postgresql on windows, at home, and see what happens if I load in a million rows. Supposedly, from my readings, there are PG databases with 4 terabytes. They must have a lot of rows in some of those tables. I just want to see if Postgresql will function ok when I load something of some size. As for Rekall and Access, they offer an out of the box table browse when you click on a table. But, it will blow up if the table has 250,000 rows, in the case of Rekall. I am just curious to see what happens when I do certain things, and my curiosity paid off, because I learned something about a design limitation in Rekall.
If I were designing some kind of application for real life, of course I would want to limit the amount of info that a user brings across in a query, and not give them a million rows in a combobox. Give me some credit. I am not an utter moron.
But there are in theory databases with tables that have millions of rows, and in theory, one must occasionally issue an SQL command to be performed on the server side that will process all those rows.
I am certain that Postgresql is rock solid on Unix/Linux, but who knows what the Windows version is like, unless I play around with it. And I should be able to write a program in Liberty Basic, for example, to produce large scripts of test data, to load in with isql. And I should be able to export those large test tables too. And it should work as advertised, and not blow up. But I wont know unless I try it out.
Actually, what I am trying to do right now is learn enough of either VBA (if I am going to work with Access) or Python (if I am going to work with Rekall) so that I can create a form which would deal with several tables, where my code would control what gets fetched and displayed, and limited to a small a number of rows as possible to accomplish whatever is necessary. I just want to learn a little SQL before I die, having come from an RPG COBOL Dbase world a long time ago.
As much as I dislike the evil empire of Microsoft, there are tons of books and forums on VBA and Access, which is a distinct advantage.
I had downloaded a version of Python for windows, and all it seemed to do was run inside a small DOS like window. Now, I see with Rekall, that it uses Python but runs in Windows, and not in a DOS terminal window. This weekend, I want to examine the Help tutorial that comes with Rekall, to see if I can find out how to write my own code to perform SQL queries and process the rows returned. The does not seem to be a lot in the search engines as far as tutorials or code examples. A lot more seems to be available for VBA. I do notice that Rekall will allow you to save the forms to a folder. And when I look at those forms in an editor, it seems to be the Python code. So perhaps I can learn something from studying the code in those forms which Rekall produces.
I guess I would like it better if I could gain some proficiency in Rekall and Python, since it would free me from the M$ world of Access and VBA. The two companies that produce Rekall seem a bit odd to me right now, and raise some doubts in my mind about the future of the product, but I like what I see in the demo so far.
I would just like to find a free, or low cost basic like language that would let easily paint GUI forms in some IDE, and then easily add my own script to interact with the Postgresql database. Such an a development environment, and such tutorials should be very common and easily accessible, since a sql engine is not much use unless you can access it.
Probably Powerbasic or Realbasic would do what I want, and I would feel comfortable with them, but they are rather expensive.
Anyway, thanks everyone for your tips and advice.
Like I said before get the personal/standard version of Delphi 6,7 or 2005, it's 99.99 and you can connect to postgres with it using third party component sets like Zeos. (2005 may not be available yet) The licence varies on the version, I think Delphi 6 personal allows for commercial developement if you buy the shrink wrapped version, the others may only allow non commercial development. There is another option you may not be aware of: http://www.icsharpcode.com/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx Totally free and rivals Visual Studio.net and has a visual form developer. Check it out. You can use it with the Npgsql native .net data provider for Postgresql. Not as easy to develop DB apps as Delphi, but a better choice than Access. You can create a databound form in Delphi just as easily as access and you don't need to learn VBA or Python, just Pascal. Delphi is Pascal (object pascal to be exact) and is easy to learn and intuitive. It was taught at most high schools/universities before Java came around As far as the testing goes I am just try to get across the fact that the type of testing you are doing is kind of a waste of time on a client/server type system. Like I said before it's fine for Access or Dbase. Bringing huge results sets (250,000) can bring Oracle to it's knees if the conditions are right. Access is probably doing some kind of internal paging, it's not really bringing back 250,000 rows. Rekal on the other hand probably attempts to bring back all them and that's why it hangs. It can take a huge amount of time to bring back that many records across the wire, especially if you are on simple home network that is probably running at 10mbits per second in half duplex mode. Using a massive amount of rows to test your dev tools is flawed because of the fact one may be doing paging and the other is not. > > I would just like to find a free, or low cost basic like language that > would let easily paint GUI forms in some IDE, and then easily add my > own script to interact with the Postgresql database. Such an a > development environment, and such tutorials should be very common and > easily accessible, since a sql engine is not much use unless you can > access it. > > Probably Powerbasic or Realbasic would do what I want, and I would > feel comfortable with them, but they are rather expensive. >
On Apr 28, 2005, at 5:04 PM, Typing80wpm@aol.com wrote: > I would just like to find a free, or low cost basic like language that > would let easily paint GUI forms in some IDE, and then easily add my > own script to interact with the Postgresql database. Such an a > development environment, and such tutorials should be very common and > easily accessible, since a sql engine is not much use unless you can > access it. > > Probably Powerbasic or Realbasic would do what I want, and I would > feel comfortable with them, but they are rather expensive. Maybe consider doing web-based forms. PHP is free and you can get the source of phpPgAdmin which shows how to do just about anything you might want including forms-based editing and query browsing. John DeSoi, Ph.D. http://pgedit.com/ Power Tools for PostgreSQL
FWIW, I'm using PostgreSQL on Windows with an Access/VBA FE that is currently under development. My PostgreSQL BE has 29 tables and several of them currently have anywhere from 1 to 8 million records and growing. For me, Access was really the only choice. In our corporate environment, everybody has it. Plus, that's what I know how to use. I didn't see the sense in learning something different. Sure, I could have gone with something different and I've given thought to a web interface with PHP - but I figured that the project would get done much quicker if I used tools that I was already familiar with. Plus I can always go back and build a web interface later if that becomes required.
Just my two cents.
Mike
From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Typing80wpm@aol.com
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 5:05 PM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: [GENERAL] Postgresql and VBA vs Python
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 5:05 PM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: [GENERAL] Postgresql and VBA vs Python
[snip]
I am certain that Postgresql is rock solid on Unix/Linux, but who knows what the Windows version is like, unless I play around with it.
[snip]
On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 23:23, John DeSoi wrote: > On Apr 28, 2005, at 5:04 PM, Typing80wpm@aol.com wrote: > > > I would just like to find a free, or low cost basic like language that > > would let easily paint GUI forms in some IDE, and then easily add my > > own script to interact with the Postgresql database. Such an a > > development environment, and such tutorials should be very common and > > easily accessible, since a sql engine is not much use unless you can > > access it. > > > > Probably Powerbasic or Realbasic would do what I want, and I would > > feel comfortable with them, but they are rather expensive. > > Maybe consider doing web-based forms. PHP is free and you can get the > source of phpPgAdmin which shows how to do just about anything you > might want including forms-based editing and query browsing. There's a new, promising framework for PHP called Green Orange that looks pretty easy to use. http://www.greenorange.org/public/index.php
> Like I said before get the personal/standard version of Delphi 6,7 or > 2005, it's 99.99 and you can connect to postgres with it using third > party component sets like Zeos. (2005 may not be available yet) Zeos was ported to http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/ (a "free Delphi"). I did test the Lazarus, but not the Zeos (yet). Vlad