[mittelhauser]

Guys,

A few comments...

1) The performance issues that Juk and I were discussing is in the NEXT beta. The January beta has some bugs that slow it down as the files get larger. Please feel free to try out the January beta (with smaller numbers of hands) and give me your feedback but these are only betas. The database schema is still changing, the product is still improving...

2) Josh, I acknowledge everything you say. Pat has done a great job with PT and provides very good support which has given him a loyal following. Having said that, it is a very big (potential) market and I believe that I will be able to compete. There is plenty of space for more than one piece of software. As Xiphoid dug up, this isn't my first software venture. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] If I produce something substantially better and do a good job marketing it, it will succeed. If not, PT will continue to dominate and he may adopt some of the features that I have that he is missing. Either way, you (the consumer) wins.

3) Juk, I haven't had a chance to play with PokerManager much yet. How big is your firebird DB with 800k hands? Does it store info about *every* player or just players that match a certain criteria (e.g. X hands known).

4) Nibster, no there is no duplicate data in the database. However, there is a lot of calculated data. I'm at home right now so can't give you the exact stats on the various table sizes but...With 250k hands, we have:

*250k rows in the Game table (datetime, name of game, etc)
*250k rows in the GameCalc table (number of players, number of players seeing flop, total pot, rake, etc),
*I'd think somewhere between 5k and 20k rows in the Player table (this one is small and just stores their name)
* Approximately 1.5million rows in the Seat table (6 players ave * 250k hands) which stores the seat #, pos relative to button, etc.
* Approx. 1.5 million rows in the SeatCalc table. This is the BIG one where I store a lot more data than PT does. All the basic info you expect (net for the hand, player VP$IP yes/no, player went to showdown, etc). In addition to the info that they store, I keep track of more specific poker info like the rank of the hand you have at the flop, turn and river; how many overcards you have to the board at the flop and turn; how many outs you had to a straight, flush or straight flush; your EV (if more than one set of hole cards is know) at each stage, etc.

I have some ideas on how to optimize this latter data down but it becomes a tradeoff between space and performance. I can easily shrink the DB size but then the query performance may suffer to much. I am still trying to find the right balance.

One easy way to shrink the DB may be to purge out players who we don't have enough info about to be useful on a semi-regular basis. On my current test, I have 250k hands of data on one player but there are a TON of players in the DB with less than 100 hands of data on. That data could be purged, archived to a separate db (in case I get more data later), etc, etc.

Anyway, I'm still working on it...keep tuned if you are interested. Although my blog and PDV forums will be updated more than 2+2...

-Jon