What's the maximum number of products?

[tintin99]

I have a potential client who sells second-hand books and has 50,000 in stock. Is Actinic a sensible solution for something like that and can it actually accommodate that many products?

Thanks,

Bob.

[leehack]

No way Jose.
20k is mentioned as the max, realistically i think 7-8k if using SPPs, is pushing it nowadays. Even if you use multiple products per page, i don't see it realistically managing it and to be honest, Access should not be used for that size site IMO.

[pnagames]

Bob

if i remember well, it has been mentioned before that actinic provides an enterprise solution (i think its the correct name) and if i remember well it supports more products as they dont use access.

i would give sales a call to double check as i may telling porkies

[marke]

From the Microsoft website:
"If you use a Counter as the primary key, a table can contain up to four billion records."
so anything up to 4 billion products is fine! The limitation with Access is the size of the database. It is limited to 2Gb (I think). So simply from a database size point of view these are the limitations. However, I would agree with Lee when it comes to whats realistically possible in terms of numbers of products. For the sorts of numbers of products you are talking about you really need to be on a server based database not Access.

[tintin99]

4 billion records! That should do it!

Seriously though, I looked up the Enterprise Version on the Actinic site and it says that will handle up to 20,000 products with images. It doesn't say if it will handle more without images, but it does go on to say you can create an unlimited number of sections and subsections.

Maybe I'll give sales a call tomorrow. Thanks for your help guys!

Bob.

[Mike Hughes]

The question on the number of products isn't just an access issue. Actinic uses 'cat' files (text files) on the server to hold the product details and these could get big and slow to process with very large sites.

I don't know how actinic splits up the cat files but wouldn't be surprised if it was one per section. I'm sure it's possible to set up a website so that these files don't get too large. Actinic would need to confirm how they're organised (and whether this is likely to be an issue).

Mike

[wjcampbe]

I believe a quick check will reveal one cat file per page.

[gabrielcrowe]

also, take into consideration the mount of time required to build your catalog.

probably days with 50k products.

you sir, are barking up the entirely wrong ecommerce tree.

[RuralWeb]

woof woof woof woof

[Mike Hughes]

I believe a quick check will reveal one cat file per page.

I think you're right Bill. So that's going to be awful lot of cat files if it's one product per page. Although if it ended up as 10 books per page then there'd be a lot fewer files.

Either way I have to agree with the others. For Actinic to generate and upload all those files is going to be long and slow process. wasn't there a post on the forum a day or so ago from someone who said it was taking 8 hours for actinic to generate the site before uploading? I wonder how large that site was and what spec of PC he was using?

Mike

EDIT: Ok there were a couple of threads. One talking about a couple of hours one talking about 80 minutes. Either way it's a long time.

[ackerman]

Is it really so impossible? I have 20th books on our site without any problems. Maybe not 1 product per page though.

[Mike Hughes]

I don't think anyone is saying it's impossible. Just that it's pushing it a bit.

In your own case it looks like you have maybe something like 500 product pages (a quick check on your sitemap) and some of your pages have over 200 products on them (that cat file must be quite large although it seems fast enough to add to cart).

Out of interest, how long does your site take to do an upload?

Mike

[ackerman]

I don't think anyone is saying it's impossible. Just that it's pushing it a bit.

In your own case it looks like you have maybe something like 500 product pages (a quick check on your sitemap) and some of your pages have over 200 products on them (that cat file must be quite large although it seems fast enough to add to cart).

Out of interest, how long does your site take to do an upload?

Mike

I guess about ten minutes. Most of that is in checking the files etc. A fresh upload is about 20/30 minutes, but I don't obviously do that very often.

[Mike Hughes]

10 Minutes is not too bad. Liveable with anyway.

At least you don't use any of the 'best seller' or 'also bought' features as I think these would slow things down a lot.

The big questions for the original poster would have to be whether:

a) they wanted single product per page (i.e. 50,000 pages). I would assume they do as second hand books would need a proper description of author, title, ISBN, publication date, condition etc.

b) Would they want Actinic to generate 'best sellers', 'also bought' etc as these could slow things down quite a bit.

Mike

[ackerman]

10 Minutes is not too bad. Liveable with anyway.

At least you don't use any of the 'best seller' or 'also bought' features as I think these would slow things down a lot.

Mike

So far it is ok. I plan to start adding extended info with maybe a picture to some of the books. I guess this will slow it down a bit. I will just keep going until something breaks!
I don't use brochure pages, so if I add any "best sellers" I would add them from outside.

Maybe a book site could be divided into several sites, as customers will be interested in a particular category.