>>Hi,
>> I am developing an application (part of TTS) that convert letters to relevant phonemes for final year project. Some exception words may be stored in database. My supervisor asks me to use binary search to faster the searching. However, since i am using VFP....I suppose binary search is not useful. I would like prove to my supervisor that FP database engine will much faster than binary search by programming.
>> Anybody got any experience with it....and may provide certain test result that can prove FP engine is faster?
>>
>>
>>Thank you
>
>Binary search of what data structure, a sorted array? How large is the data set? Binary searches are only efficient when the data fits in RAM. If the data set is so large that it is swapped to disk, the performance will suffer. Also there is the overhead in maintaining the sorted order. If the data resides in a file, b-tree indices are much more efficient because they are designed to minimize disk accesses. B-trees also eliminate the need for physical sorting of the data set.

The following link has detailed analysis of data access agorithms including binary searches and the b-tree family (including b+trees and b*trees). This looks like a fun course!

http://www.cs.byu.edu/courses/cs453/lectnotes.html