File store (was Re: Salutations)

[Bill Gribble]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 02:35:39PM +0000, Al B. Snell wrote:
> SELECT SUM(amount),date_to_week_num(date) AS week FROM splits WHERE
> account=<account ID here> GROUP BY week;
> 
> That will produce a "total change" for each week, eg a delta series
> instead of a time series, so you have to do some addition in software.

What I understood your proposal about closing books to be was:
 - at book closing time all account balances get rolled
   up into a 'closing/opening' balance for the next period.
 - expenses/income get transferred to equity.  
 - old transactions get put in a file which can be archived. 
 - when gnucash starts up, only the current accounting period is 
   loaded. 

If you only have transaction information for the current accounting
period, how is it that you can get transaction information from other
accounting periods for this report?  You need details, not just the
end-of-period balance.

This isn't a conceptual problem; we know all the data is there, in
other files.  It's just a practical problem: how do we build an
infrastructure for querying our history that knows about temporarily
opening old books, but opening them read-only, probably displaying
them differently from current books, being smart enough to open only
the right sets of closed books.... etc etc.

If your bit of database-ish code was meant to imply "you just solve
this problem by putting the data in a database", well, I'll agree that
that's a part of the answer, or at least part of ONE possible answer.
However, that's not even close to a complete solution.

Bill Gribble