String lengths in the SQL backend

[Derek Atkins]

Phil Longstaff <plongstaff at rogers.com> writes:

>> Wait, the ENTIRE contents are read in?  Historically only "necessary
>> data" was read in.  That would be the Accounts and Commodities from
>> the main CoA.  The transactions were all loaded on demand.
>
> Yes.  I wanted to only read "necessary data".  However, my (admittedly 
> incomplete) knowledge of the engine led me to the conclusion that parts of th 
> engine assume that all data is present.  I couldn't get the account tree to 
> show correct values, for example, unless all splits for an account were 
> present.  I ended up just loading the whole database into memory.

There should not be any dependence on reading in all the data from the DB.
The old PG Backend certainly did not, and it worked fine.  I think it got
around it by having checkpoints for things like running account balances,
so you only need to load "current" transactions, not all of them.

If you're loading all data all the time then the only benefit to the DB
backend over the XML backend is save-on-commit.

> Phil

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
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