Rebol and databases

A couple of issues you'd want to think about.... The Official Guide creates a single-user database using ASCII (text files). This sort of scheme has several drawbacks regardless of the language you are using: 1. Can you detect and stop two or more users updating the data at once? Or detect and stop twin invocations of the same program on one machine, which can be just as bad. (There was a thread about this some time back, headed I think "Double Trouble") 2. If not, can you support or tolerate multiple update streams? 3. Do you need atomicity? If you need to update two or more records at once, can you ensure that either both or neither happen? (MYSQL doesn't support this fairly basic database need. Writing your own in Rebol would be an interesting challenge) 4. Given the files are simple ASCII text, the user could easily bypass any consistency/security checks you've built in by editing the files. You'd either need to protect or hide the data (use encryption if you have PRO or--not perfect but it's a start--COMPRESS if you don't. 5. A bundle of Text files is an accident magnet. Can you detect that the user has overwritten one, or deleted an important one? Can you recreate the data from a log if they've screwed up? If what you want to do is in anyway mission critical, get a real database. If it's not, or if failure is only a minor nuisance, text files a la Official Guide are a good starting point. That's my two cents' worth (something we Europeans can now say given the imminence of the euro). --Colin