Re: A Customer's Request For Open Source Software

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I think that depends on how you go about doing it. If you're talking 
about small to medium sized businesses (Not Citibank or GM) how many 
accounts do you think they'll want to maintain? How many transactions do 
you think they'll need to support? Certainly for "home" accounting and 
most small businesses, this number can't be really huge. Are the 
accounts and transactions going to be simple ascii and numeric stuff (a 
few hundred bytes a piece, at most?) Or are we going to have to store 
graphics or other really memory intense items with each transaction. 
(Like if you want to keep scanned-in receipts for a transaction.)

I'd think a memory based model would be sufficient right now for 
single-user accounting for home or small businesses. I also think it 
wouldn't be an imense job to take the basic in-memory model and then 
later modify it to write-through to a database or otherwise deal with a 
"transaction" that has to have integrity between multiple users. (Think 
multiple-clients, single-server) So the thing is you could start simple 
and get the programming model you want and then upgrade to fancier 
back-ends if you've got a basic product that works.

For that, I'd think a 32-bit address space ought to be sufficient. But 
if you're doing dynamic allocation and you code things properly, 
switching to a bigger address space ought to be near trivial.

MDC


Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> 
> For a financial package is 4 Gigabytes of addressable memory enough? 
> (Two Gigabytes currently under Windows.)  Some people are running up 
> against that limit with spreadsheets, and most large database servers 
> use machines with 64-bit address space support.  Note that with current 
> large databases a 32-bit address space is insufficient to manage the 
> indexes and tables that are (virtual) memory resident.

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Marin David Condic
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My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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