People that frequent this site know that I primarily deal with PHP/MySQL development, but I've done serious development in the other core languages. When I initially started, ColdFusion was the first server side 'dynamic' language that I was exposed to. Switching programming firms, I was then required to code in ASP and PHP. Towards then end of my days at that programming firm, we started to do heavy development in ASP.NET, primarily with C#.
I was lucky enough to be able to go out on my own and start my web development venture. Due to hosting costs and programming resources, I decided to stick with PHP/MySQL, but still often dabble in .NET/C# jobs here and there.
With this sponsored post, I would like to discuss DataStreams. They produce and develop a very specific and incredibly useful component library for ASP.NET. The library that they develop is CVSReader. It is currently compatible with all 'active' .NET framework versions (1.0, 1.1 and 2.0). What is interesting to me about this product, is that they focus on speed. The ability to parse CSV and Excel documents have been around for years, but have always been resource intensive and slow. Normally, you need this ability to populate a 'fresh' database, etc, so is only performed a few times. However, if you need to do this on a routine basis, say daily, a bulky CVS reader could really hurt the performance of the site or application.
The folks at DataStream have devoted their skills to make an efficient library to quickly suck those files in and parse them at a fast rate. Check out some of these speeds...
The following test used a 68.37MB file:
ODBC Microsoft Text Driver: 27.83 seconds
Microsoft Jet OLD Driver: 12.88 seconds
CVSReader: 3.41 seconds!!!!!!
Now, that is impressive.
As a programmer, I'm always trying to decide if I want to write or buy a library or utility script that already does what I want it to do. It comes down to budget, time to develop, and if you can build something as good if not better. A library like this, I can totally see spending some money to add something quick and efficient so you could focus on the business logic of the application.
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