J
James A. Fortune
This is invaluable "low level" stuff that might come in handy later.
But since my data is in a text file, it might be easier just to read
each file, and import the data into a SQL table, no? If you go the
table route. If you go the XML route you just save to XML. Why
bother with the Excel intermediary step?
RL
CSV, Excel and XML all suffer from extra overhead when reading data.
It's not a lot, but it can add up when there are lots of records.
Using Excel was simply an easy way to get the data into some kind of
data store that doesn't have the same performance hit as those
formats. Of course, Arne's idea of storing the data in RAM is much,
much faster (i.e., once the data is read) than using a database if
you don't mind handling possibilities like invalid, malformed or
duplicate data yourself.
James A. Fortune
(e-mail address removed)