[ruttopia]

Not sure if the topic accurately describes this, but how exactly does something like iTunes store all its data? Even with 1,000 songs, iTunes still opens fast and has the data readily available. I'm just beginning with OS X programming, but if I just use a standard file format to store 1,000 records of data, will it be as fast? Or does iTunes use something else (a database?) to make it get the data so quickly?

I've programmed a long time, but never doing anything involving _a lot_ of records and files. I want to write some cataloging type software and the potential is there for needing to access thousands of records very quickly.

Any ideas?

[Borborygmi]

I would like to get some info on how to do this as well... I've been trying to figure out how to do the whole NSArchiver thing in Cocoa, but I wonder if there is a limit to the size that you can make an array (well, I'm sure there is a limit, but I just need to store ~20,000 records for my app. Any suggestions on the best way to do this would be very helpful.

[ruttopia]

Alright, I'm bumping this because I'm really interested in this and I don't want to subscribe to the giant email lists to find the answer. How does iTunes work with all it's data -- a mock database or what? I've never done anything like that, but would like to try. So how does it work?

Anyone?

[ryochiji]

I've never written a database, per se, but I've written an mp3 player and I used a linked list to hold data for tracks in the playlist. If we're only talking about several thousand records, a simple linked list should do.
If you know you're going to be searching through it a lot, or you have significantly more than several thousand records, you can create another sorted index, which could be another linked list of records that contain a field and a pointer to the main data object.
But again, I'm not a database programmer so someone with more experience in that field might have better advice...

HTH,
Ryo