Jon Glass (jonglass_at_usa.net) wrote:
> Can a record in a database contain another record? Can you add fields to
> one record but not add them to another. Can you put a work phone in a
> phone field in one record, but a work field in the same place in another
> record, and have the database automatically keep them straight? I have some
> Newton names that have more phones than most desktop apps have allowed for
> years.
With an SQL database, you do things differently, but you can achieve the
same results. As I said: it's not about soups vs. databases, but about
power and flexibility. More power and flexibility means that it will be
harder to sync, so you have to decide what you value most.
> Except when you remove a card and sync. What does the developer do with a
> missing record? Delete it from the desktop app? I wish it were that simple.
> :-)
That's hardly the fault of union soups. If you remove a card containg
part of a union soup, the number of entries shrinks accordingly. What do
you do (in general) when some record is present on the desktop computer
but not on the PDA? What do you do if it's the other way round? Synching
_is_ inherently difficult, and there's not a single correct way to solve
such problems. Outlawing union soups wouldn't help you a bit.
> It is a nightmare, as is backing up, because every backup, I have to move
> out the old backup and create a new file, which is a hassle, and takes
> forever, even over appletalk.
I do backups (always full backups, for the reason you mentioned) over
ethernet, using AppleTalk. I can't complain about speed. Using a card for
backup is also quite fast.
> NCU somehow seems to randomly corrupt incremental backups, and you never
> know it has happened until you need to restore, and then it's too late.
> Horrible in comparison to the Palm.
With my Newtons, I rarely ever had to resort to restoring from a backup
(except when I installed the memory expansion for my eMate). My Visor
deluxe, like all Palm-compatibles, loses its memory whenever its
batteries die (as a rule, whenever I think I could use the Visor for
something, the batteries are dead, and have no fresh AAA batteries
around), so restoring data from a backup is something you have to do all
the time -- except that I can't, because the Visor refuses to sync.
> it worked as advertized, and it SYNCED!! :-)
For me it doesn't. :-(
- Michael
Michael J. Hussmann
E-mail: michael_at_michael-hussmann.de
WWW: http://michael-hussmann.de
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