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perhaps i'm being too demanding, but one of my major difficulties with these newer breed of programs is precisely the various data sources habit of changing the formating, adding fields, etc--and the user is stuck with the price of updating his software, taking a series of hits to his bank due to the new data and its impact on the computations, on so on.
personally, i dont understand why you, as a programmer, can not approach equibase directly for the data? lest its completely prohibitive in price. seems most of the problems arise from the providers, anyway. and i do not understand why a data provider like trackmaster would arbitrarily undermine so many softare users dependent upon their information by changing how a variant is calculated, or intercalating a field into their table, thus requiring some adjustment by the software vendor.
is there any data provider with which one may contract that keeps its db in a stable format? adding fields to a pre-existing db in no way effects how the fields that were there previously are read by your program. they are simply truncated. so, theoretically, one's program would be largely immune to any change in data structures if the provider wished to make that a priority.
tlt
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