Performance improvement for xml loads (+comments)

[Jason Godfrey]

On Thu, Dec 07, 2000 at 05:44:15PM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:

> I admit that I don't know very much about DBMS systems.  Are columns
> in a table labeled?  And can you arbitrarily add a new column to an
> existing table (I suppose you could create a new table with the
> existing column information and add the new column, then destroy the
> old table and rename the new table back to the old one).  I just want
> to make sure that you're not dependent upon a particular column
> position for data.  (Again, I know next to nothing about DBMS or SQL).
> 
> But if this _IS_ how you do it, I still claim that it is equivalent to
> reading in all your data and then writing it out in the "new" format
> (or, in this case, a new table with an additional column).  I suppose
> the only benefit here is that if you run an older application that
> doesn't understand the new data against the newer database table with
> the newer data, then it could still theoretically understand the rest
> of the data.  However, I wouldn't trust it, because that extra column
> may have information that the older application NEEDS to know in order
> to properly understand the data.

Maybe not. If gnucash was to add some extra tax information, the older 
version does not need to know about that the new tax information to understand
the rest of the data.

Also, tables can be added at whim without affecting tables that are already
exsisting.

- Jason