I’m quite new to Java Programming and am writing my first desktop app, this app takes a unique isbn and first checks to see if its all ready held in the local DB, if it is then it just reads from the local DB, if not it requests the data from isbndb.com and enters it into the DB the local DB is in XML format. Now what im wondering is which of the following two methods would create the least overhead when checking to see if the entry all ready exists.
Method 1.) File Exists.
On creating said DB entry the app would create a seperate file for every isbn number named isbn number.xml (ie. 3846504937540.xml) and when checking would use the file exists method to check if an entry all ready exists using the user provided isbn .
Method 2.) SAX XML Parser.
All entries would be entered into a single large XML file and when checking for existing entries the SAX XML Parser would be used to parse the file and then the user provided isbn would be checked against those in the XML DB for a match.
Note :
The resulting entries could number in the thousands over time.
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
I don’t think either of your methods is all that great. I strongly suggest using a DBMS to store the data. If you don’t have a DBMS on the system, or if you want an app that can run on systems without an installed DBMS, take a look at using SQLite. You can use it from Java with SQLiteJDBC by David Crawshaw.
As far as your two methods are concerned, the first will generate a huge amount of file clutter, not to mention maintenance and consistency headaches. The second method will be slow once you have a sizable number of entries because you basically have to read (on the average) half the data base for every query. With a DBMS, you can avoid this by defining indexes for the info you need to look up quickly. The DBMS will automatically maintain the indexes.