cSuneido Query Improvement

Recently we've been working on fixing some of the "slow" queries in our applications. Usually this means adding appropriate composite (multi-field) indexes.

But in one case, that didn't completely fix the problem. We added the index necessary to select the right data but then we summarizing by different fields and that was requiring a temporary index.

Thinking about this, I realized that it doesn't make much sense to create a temporary index so summarize can read the data in the right order to process it sequentially. Better to just read the data in any order and accumulate the results. That means you have to process all the data before you can produce any output, but that's no different than having to create the temporary index first. And (in most cases) the accumulated results will be smaller that the temporary index, since you're summarizing.

It didn't seem like this should be too hard to add. (typical programmer optimism)

But then I started looking at the code and I realized that although the query operations choose strategies, they weren't actually using the strategy pattern. Instead they just have a bunch of if's to alter their behavior based on the chosen strategy.

It's funny that hasn't struck me before. It seems so obvious. And it's not like I just learned about the strategy pattern. I read Design Patterns when it first came out in 1994, 15 years ago. I'd made each query operation a separate class, but for some reason I'd stopped there.

So I decided to refactor the summarize code to use separate strategy classes. Which again turned out to be a bigger job than I thought.

I started out with just using my text editor (Scite) but I've been spoilt with all my IDE usage. So I tried using NetBeans (6.5). But that didn't work too well. I could build from NetBeans but I couldn't double click on the errors to go to the offending source. (Even with Scite I can do that.) And I couldn't seem to configure it to my indenting style (Whitesmith's).

So I switched to Eclipse. It's not as easy to import a project into Eclipse as it is in NetBeans, but after a few false starts I get it going. It does support Whitesmith's style. And you can double click on the errors. But C++ support in NetBeans or Eclipse isn't anywhere close to as nice as Java support.

One problem with splitting things up after the fact is that the code tends to have developed interconnections. Luckily it wasn't too hard to pass the necessary information.