User Profile for rpm3--2008

Panorama 5.5.1 (Mac OS X)

Memory Issues and foreign text   

This from Jim Rea, the President of Provue Develoment (http://provue.com/cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?qnazone~qnamessage~13335): " the total memory available to Panorama is no more than 1.1 GB. At WWDC I verified that this was true even on a machine with 8 GB of memory. I set up Panorama's powerpc.ini file to request 3 GB of memory, but the operating system would only give Panorama 1.1 GB. I was able to get some input on this from an Apple engineer at the conference. Currently Panorama is requesting the memory from Apple's Carbon interface. Apparently if Panorama requests the memory directly from UNIX we should be able to get up to about 2.5 GB. So we'll be looking into doing that in a future release. This may have to wait until Panorama is moved to XCode —— if so it won't happen for a while." So even with more RAM in a machine, the allocation for Panorama memory is limited to 1.1GB. So don't expect Panorama to be able to handle a 1.6 GB file, as I tried to do. Their customer support did get back with me on the foreign language issue, so thumbs up on that. Though they are a bit misinformed about alphabetizing resources, telling me that no resource will treat dual vowels like oe the same as ö. Not true, every program with German language options does exactly that. Still they helpfully pointed out that it is possible to change the sorting resources in Panorama, so I will look into it. Or will at the point they move to Xcode and up the memory allocation so I can use the software. Until then I will having a cup of coffee while Filemaker plugs away, slowly but surely. Cheers, rpm [alert admin]

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Saturday, February 07 2009 @ 09:56 AM PST

Panorama 5.5.1 (Mac OS X)

Panorama RAM requirements/Foreign language issues   

I am dealing with a database with circa 3.5 million entries (all text, 7 fields, averaging 15 characters per field). Problem one: This is RAM-based software, so for a larger database you had best have a *lot* of RAM. Panorama, despite boosting the memory usage to max 999MB, pukes out "not enough memory" and "i/o error" messages when trying to import text or even doing simple "find/replace all" commands. OK, I have been trying this with a Mac G4 with 1,25GB RAM, perhaps if i try it on a G5 with 8GB RAM it will not be an issue. Filemaker, however slow it is, does function however as long as Autosave is on while doing 8 hours of "find/replace all." Filemaker's text import, despite reports to the contrary, is nearly as fast as Panorama's, but *only* if all the indexing is turned off. Problem two: unlike Filemaker, no options for alphabetizing foreign, in this case German, characters. Treats ä, ö and ü like a, o, and u rather than treating it the same, according to German text standards, as ae, oe, and ue. I presume the same limitations apply to anybody else using a foreign language with different text characters, something which must limit Panorama users to English-speaking countries. I have been waiting three days for a response from Provue's tech support on the foreign language issue, and despite the site claiming there were only 23 questions ahead of mine, have not yet received and answer. So still up in the air about the company's customer support. [alert admin]

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Thursday, February 05 2009 @ 04:18 AM PST

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