DemoTools - questions and answers: program too slow

It takes a very long time to load the data when I click the "Modify" button

When you click the "Modify" button, the program retrieves all necessary input data and parameter files from a data base according to your selection of countries and variants. If you use the default input data the program has to extract records from the huge database, which we have compiled and calculated from published data of the 1998 United Nations World Population Prospects.

This automatic compilation of appropriate input data files is not a trivial task: Just to give you an impression of what the program has to do, consider the following:
We have input data for 188 countries and 30 regions (218 geographical units); for each unit we have 3 variants (high, medium, low) and 6 types of variables (population, fertility, mortality, migration, general, etc.); the population, migration, mortality, and calibration values are in 20 age-groups by sex. The data archive contains data-files with a total 617,495 records. The largest files are so big, that they exceed the internal limits of MS-Excel (we had to handle them with MS-Access).
When you click "Modify", the program has to find the right records out of more than half a million records for the countries and variants in the data archive and copy them to specific input files in the "workspace" subdirectory.
(By the way, this is just a rough description, what happens - in reality the program also conducts a number of data-validating tasks while it compiles the appropriate input files.)

In other words, we believe the data retrieval is actually extremely fast. If it still takes some time, the delay is primarily due to hardware constraints.