File store (was Re: Salutations)

[Al Snell]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2000, Phillip Shelton wrote:

> Will the closing of the books be easier or harder with a DB?

Depends how you want to handle it. You could create archives as saved
GnuCash files, flush the transaction logs, then create initial equity
transactions to set up initial balances... or put archives in the DB in a
different set of tables (wouldn't recommend this due to code duplication
in accessing the archives...) with the same format, or keep the archives
in the same trasactions table but add a "period" field which is set to the
current period number on new transactions, and to close the books, just
create "closing books" transfers of all balances to equity, increment the
period number, then create "opening books" transfers of all balances FROM
equity. All normal DB access quieries would have "...where period=N" for
the current period in order to eliminate old transactions from queries -
unless the user asks for the archives to be scanned...

I favour the "creating a saved GnuCash file" (in XDR format? :-) method of
archiving, since saved files are well suited to archiving. Archives in
SQL databases are useful for data mining and OLAP, but are more costly to
store - anm archive file can be dumped onto tape or just deleted by the
user at their convenience...

> 
> Phill
> 

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software