Check out this entry from Steven and Ali over at iteration::two. A sample chapter of their upcoming Flex book is now available for download at theserverside.com. Now I'm not biased or anything, but my understanding is that they had the best tech editor that they could get without paying him and he can give the Macromedia stamp of approval on what you're going to see. The only thing you need to watch is that they tend to misspell a lot of words as if they learned English in a country other than America ;-) (for those of you unsure, Ali and Steven are in Scotland where they speak "English" English). Congrats to the guys for getting this chapter up, we're looking forward to seeing the whole book in the next month or two!
April 2004 Archives
Our second topic for dealing with large data sets is sorting. The problem with sorting is you need to have all of the data available in order to produce an accurate sort. However, as we saw in the last article bringing down all of the data from server to client is incredibly expensive and therefore unrealistic. Even normal web applications rarely load all of their data from the database server to the app server when dealing with a large amount.
Instead of downloading all of the data to the client we'll let the database take care of sorting for us (which is one of the things a database is very good at). Let's build on our examples from the previous article and add sorting capability to the implicit paging solution. The examples can be found here and are a superset of what we did in article 1 (meaning that the old examples are there too).
Continue reading Large Data Sets (Part 2 of 3?).
