is my database too big?

macbook pro late 2013, 8gb ram

i get often spinwheel of death and need to force quit

my database:

pdf = 9.000
rich txt = 430

total = 10.695 = 57.4 gb
words = 5, 902, 803 (unique), 516, 159, 300 total

Yes

then how big should be my database in regarding my mac?

Bill has a stickey post on database size in this forum.

40,000,000 total words in a database is a comfortable limit for most modern machines.

oh, my database is more then 10x biger!!!

so, i need then to split my database. That would mean that i cannot longer use replicants, for replicants working only inside one database.

what can you suggest me to do in that case? many pdf files in my database have been replicated into other folders.

so, again no one from devs to answer!?

I think what you need to know is that this forum is not a vehicle to contact the developers but a user to user support system, and if no user who happens to read your posting knows the answer you will not get a reply. It is true that the developers do sometimes read and respond and the is a bonus. If you want to contact them the way is to go to Menu>Help>Contact Us and send them a message. I have found that sarcastic comments do not help.

this forum is for snobs. really, a snobistic one.
try to look at scrivener forum: their app is also wonderful, but also their devs.

good buy to you all – i`ll never again buy this app: i will borrow it next time

Well. That escalated quickly?? :open_mouth:

Umm… wow. :open_mouth:

I feel that I need to apologise to the developers and good folk of this forum if what I said caused offence but I am just fed up with some people’s constant complaining and sarcasm. It is easy to criticise but apparently very hard for some to be appreciative of what to my mind are a great set of apps that come from the DEVONtechnologies stable. I have vented my spleen and let that suffice.

Allsop, your remark was spot on! Sorry to say, but I’d say good riddance.

Hermeneut is totally off the mark: Bluefrog actually gave him the answer:

I’m not sure what else he wants. His DB is too big, and it’s on him to figure out how to split it. That depends almost completely on the exact content and needs of the particular user.

Is this a threat to pirate a copy of DT3? If you are so disgusted by the devs and the forum members, I strongly suggest that you stay consistent and away from the software altogether. Pirating is lame. As a Slashdot reader, I’m tempted to throw in a bad car analogy: If you are disgusted by the fact that your Volkswagen spewed all that bad stuff, is the answer to switch to Toyota, or rather to drive a stolen Volkswagen?

Pun intended?

If it still matters: Just off the top of my head, the only solution I see for sharing files across DBs (i.e. if the file gets annotated or edited in one DB, the changes would appear everywhere) would be to index all files into several DBs. However, I have not thought carefully about how to accomplish that with an existing replication structure. The following could therefore be wrong.

One weakness of the export feature of DT is that replicants are exported as individual files. I.e. if you have a file myfile.pdf replicated 10x in the DB, upon export of the DB contents, there will be 10 separate myfile.pdf files exported (i.e. they are not Finder aliases). This is of course useless, because the moment you edit/annotate one instance of myfile.pdf in the exported structure, the equivalence among them will be broken.

I was planning to write note on that at some point, i.e. how to export a DB with replicants into an equivalent structure in the Finder. I think the key is to not export the group structure into a Finder folder hierarchy (because replicants in that hierarchy will not be aliases, but independent duplicates), but to export everything “flat”, with the DT group tags converted into OS X tags. And then searching and grouping by OS X tags, not Folders. The downside is that OS X tags are not hierarchical. That’s why all my groups have unique names in DT. Then the hierarchy is actually irrelevant, or at least can be reconstructed.

To do this “flat export”, I’d give all files in the DB a common group tag, and then only export that group into a single folder in the Finder. But all the files will have their DT-based group tags as OS X tags - which can then be used to round up files as before in DT, e.g. using your favorite tag management tools.

I realize that this is pretty incoherent.

So yes, I’d actually be quite interested in constructing a method to accomplish what Hermeneut wants to do. However, as Allsop pointed out, most of us only come occasionally to this forum, and often have no time to go into details, because … we have other stuff to do in life. That’s why we have databases that are 10x the recommended size. We deal with a lot of stuff. So 3 day deadlines for solutions on this forum are not a good idea. Nevertheless, sometimes you can get a brilliant answer in 10 minutes.

@gg378: So strange… that’s exactly the first thing that came to my mind! :open_mouth:

@Allsop: No need for an apology. What you said was true and delievered with tact and courtesy. (Even the ever-so-slight scolding was ok as it wasn’t a personal attack.) If there’s anyone at fault here, it would be me. I should be here and participating more than I am. We have so much going on behind the scenes - much more than all of you know. Lots of coding, testing, recoding, retesting… all on top of Support. (And I’m not complaining. :smiley: ) My apologies for not being here more often.

Good luck with the coding. And testing. And recoding. And retesting. 8)

Back in the days, to be a “hermeneut” was to be a master of understanding. I guess that ampersand in the front comes with a few side-effects… [sigh]