personal information database

[MaxiBarac]

Hi everyone , thanks a lot for your time .

I'm developing a Hotel reservation software with labview , i have in the control panel 20 indicators , each one represents a room , i select between dates and it shows in red color the booked rooms and in green color the free ones , everything seems to work fine , now i have to add to the software the functionality to handle the people who come to the hotel (name,address,phone number,etc....)  and obviously store the data into a database so that the next time the people come,  the hotel receptionist would not  have to ask again all their personal data.

It should have a function to search into the database if the person already exits , if not just add a new one .

In a few years the data into the database will become big , so i need to know if there is a way to handle big database in labview and to be able to search into it?

Thanks in advance .

[James.M]

This sounds like a school assignment.

Have you tried anything yet for the database file I/O? Do you have any requirements for the database speed? A simple solution could involve the Config INI VIs, but that's just a simple text file in the end that's not super fast.

[MaxiBarac]

Thank you very much james.Morris .

I have a friend who has a small hotel , but he always had the problem to handle the reservations (it's a headache if you don't have a software) .

I only know the functions read/write - files/spreadsheet  in labview , but i think that way it would be very slow when you have to search a person stored in the database , i really don't have any idea the time it would take for example to search among 500 people , this could be moreless the number of people per year that come to the hotel , in 10 years we are talking of 5000 people .

Perhaps thats nothing for labview search , i really don't know , i think it must have some functions to work with big data amounts .

You ask if the speed is important , i think when you search for a persons name it could take some seconds but not minutes for example .

Thanks again for your inmediate answer .

[James.M]

If you're a newbie, I wouldn't delve too deep in to complicated methods. You can easily store a giant table of info about hotel guests without much effort. The searching through the list doesn't take very long, it's the reading and writing from file that does. You could read from your database when the program first runs, save updates to the file when necessary, but keep the database data in memory for quick searching.

[PatrickLye]

You could use the free version of Microsoft SQL Server. Then when things get larger you can upgrade, at a large cost, to their full software package. The draw back on the free version, in the 2012 version, is that it is limited to one processor or four cores and only 1 gigabyte of ram. I find that this is fine for a lot of things. I'm not certain what the 2014 Express limitation are. Now, if it is done correctly, most of the "speed" is handled on the database server, and it is just sent to LabView. It is essential to have a good high speeed network between the client and the server if you start using big data unless you put both on one computer. I wouldn't advise one computer. You can also speed things up by using stored procedures on the SQL server.

MySQL is another good database, but I'm hesitant to use it for too much since Sun was bought out by Oracle several years ago. I've been waiting for the metaphorical other shoe to drop ever since the purchase and have them kill the product or start charging heavily. I do use MySQL on my web server, but that is because it is already offered on my leased platform and required by JOOMLA.

Now as far as interfacing with databases I use the NI Database Connectivity Toolkit for Windows. It is around $1000.00.

Obviously a person could do all of the same things without the toolkit, but it is nice to have a lot of the work already completed.

[MaxiBarac]

Thank you very much again , yes i'm new in labview , but i love it , it's a powerful tool for me today &  for my future (i'm studying Electronic Engineering) .

I will try what you suggested ,your answer really helped me a lot , thanks have a beautiful day .

[James.M]

Here's a quick little interface to edit an array used as a database. You can store this array to a spreadsheet very easily using LabVIEW's File I/O palette. If you go this route, you should update the file each time new guest information is changed, so that if there's a crash you don't lose any data.

This is a snippet, so if you have LabVIEW 2014 or later you can drag it on to your block diagram as code.

[Bob_Schor]

Sometimes, if what you really want is a Database, you are better off with a Database Program.  If I were designing an algorithm to acquire data from a piece of equipment and use it to control something else, I'd think of using LabVIEW, but probably not SQLite or Access.  Similarly, if I wanted a Hotel Reservation System, LabVIEW would not be my first choice ...

Bob Schor 

[MaxiBarac]

thank you very much i will take it  into account as a good alternative . thanks

[MaxiBarac]

you are so kind , thanks a lot for your time !