Palm ZLib DB Viewer (pzdbView) is a PalmOS application for PalmOS 3.5 or higher. It can be used to view (and search in) CSV-like databases which are stored in compressed form on your Palm Storage Memory. The whole application requires a bit less than 12K of storage memory, excluding databases, of course. On most Palm devices you will as well need SysZLib (which will need about 30 K extra space). Most users will already have it (for ebook readers, for example); if not, 42K of storage are still far less than any other database viewer I know needs. Since all data are decompressed on the fly (and the decompressed form is not stored anywhere), searching is quite slow (because it has to transparently decompress the whole database every time). A full text search on a database of Germany's calling codes takes about 8 seconds on a Palm Vx. On the other hand, if you have larger databases you rarely need (but sometimes you need them), trading storage RAM (pzdb databases need about 20% of the space an equivalent Pilot-DB database needs) for search time is an acceptable compromise. The UI does not have many features; searching, scrolling, and selecting/deleting databases is everything you get. If you need to beam databases, you can use a file manager like FileZ; so pzdbView does not have its own "beam" function. The database format is quite straightforward to implement; there is a Java based converter (pzdbCreate) for converting CSV to pzdb available as well. What will pzdbView (most likely) never support?
- Editing of records
- Hires support
- Sorting
- Indices to speed up search (they need space!)
- Databases with more than 8 (visible) columns