Rush of N.Z. orders for easier-to-use dBASE IV

Press, 31 January 1989, Page 27

Rush of N.Z. orders for easier-to-use dBASE IV

NEILL BIRSS

Thousands of New Zealanders awaited the release of dBASE IV, sales figures indicate. Ashton-Tate New Zealand had 400 orders when the release arrived in the last days of October, and at present it is selling 20 upgrade kits a day. The latest release of the market leader in microcomputer databases will please the millions of loyal dBASE users throughout the world, though the competition is much tougher than when Ashton-Tate blazed trails with dBASE II in the days of 8-bit CP/M computers. It had bought the software when it was called Vulcan. When the standard moved to IBM PC, dBASE 111 soon followed, with changes to tap the machine’s power. The emergence of rival products and a changing pattern in the micro market led to dBASE 111 Plus, with its interface for easier use. The market change was the predominance of non-specialist computer users with no interest in programming. With dBASE 111 Plus, menus and help systems supplemented the programming, which was symbolised by the dot prompt, the machine’s call for instructions. The market has changed further. The market is full of database products. Giving dBASE stiff competition are products such as Paradox and RBase. The growth in microcomputer power and networks means that users now want features previously only on minicomputer and mainframe databases. Database products from the minicomputer world are migrating to personal computers and networks to meet this demand. Oracle is one of them. From below a plethora of database products confuses users. Many word processors and spreadsheets double as databases. Microsoft Windows has a card-index type simple database. Q and A has a database with the brilliant Intelligent Assistant, which allows queries in English. Another is Reflex, great for analysis. Ashton-Tate is also beset by lookalikes, some of which it is suing. And in the more serious programming field, there are products such as Clipper, which began as a compiler (turning database language into lower-level instructions to the computer, so that the database is processed very much faster). Clipper has grown into a database system, with its own language, and some developers in Christchurch use it in preference to dBASE. The latest version of dBASE is out to even the odds against the competition. Already howls have come from the market place that it has slipped in a few of its more complex functions, but for the average user and for the developer it is significantly better than dBASE 111 Plus. The software comes in two versions, both of which support both MS-DOS and the new operating system, OS/2. The ordinary user package retails for just under $l5OO (before GST) or $295 as an upgrade. A developer kit, which will appeal to contractors and others making systems for customers, is also available. A hard disk is required for dBASE IV. It comes on 14 360 K diskettes, and installed takes 3Mb of the hard disk. The documentation is extensive and excellent. With the on-line, context-sensitive (it responds to where you are in the program) help, and the six or so manuals make a teach-yourself course in database design and set-up. A conversion program adapts dBASE II files; dBASE 111 files are read direct. One of the most interesting additions to dBASE IV is the program piler. This greatly boosts the speed of programs built under dBASE. Command, procedure, and format files are interpreted into intermediate code, and saved in object files. Changes from dBASE 111 Plus are numerous. But the old dot prompt of dBASE 111 and dBASE II is still available for the nostalgic and those who find negotiating the menus a little slow, for the package is not the world’s fastest to use.

Every full-screen component of the system now has a set of pull-down menus. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) for designing forms, labels, and reports which work with database files is introduced. The Assistant is replaced by a control centre for the whole package. This can open and close fields, reach design screens, run programs, manage files, and create and manage catalogues, or sets of programs for a task. It also has a DOS file directory and manager in some ways reminiscent of the program, Xtree. The user can toggle between two different views of a database: a table display and a form display. Around the world scores of thousands of businesses have systems set up under dBASE. Mostly this has been done by programmers. With dBASE IV, the everyday user can go to the menu system of the applications generator to build up a system. Defining application as a set of programs, dBASE IV writes the code needed to run an application. The difficulty and skill needed to develop a system have been lowered markedly. A database record may now have up to 255 fields. Up to 99 files may be open, compared with 15. A new numeric field type holds floating-point data. The maximum size of a record is 4000 bytes, excluding any memo fields. Memo fields, which now exist in many •databases, have long allowed the odd record to have a large chunk of attached explanation or other information. In dBASE IV, memo fields can now be searched, and their occupation of disk space is better managed. Each memo field entry can be up to 512 K.

Among the new commands, “calculate” processes in one pass a number of records for various statistical and financial functions. Command lines may now be 1024 characters long. A look-up function allows a database search and the return of the current value of an expression. Several maths functions have been added. Memory above the DOS barrier of 640 K is accessed automatically by dBASE IV, provided the memory meets the LIM 4.0 specifications. Indexing is enhanced. As well as the traditional .ndx files of dBASE, a .mdx file is introduced. This maintains up to 47 index tags, each similar to an old .ndx file. More than one .mdx file may be open, so the user may have hundreds of indexes open at once. So instead of having to open each index of a database before use, the user now need specify only the .mdx file that brackets the indexes. Quite a few of the dBASE rivals have •been able to read dBASE files for some time. The Q and A fan can import them, for example, and then go to work on them with the Intelligent Assistant. Now dBASE can read and write files created by Framework 11, PFS File, Rapid File, and Lotus 1-2-3. The excellent manuals guide the newcomer through design of files, menus and catalogues, which are described as a useful way to organise files in a directory. Throughout dBASE IV, the menu system is thoroughly signposted. The changes described indicate the scope of the new version of dBASE IV. From the point of view of the user of a standalone system, the upgrade price is good value. However, dBASE is getting a long history, and succeeding versions may be getting a little clunky, with new capabilities piled on the old dot. prompt system’s skeleton. Running on an AT compatible at 12MHz, the package still did not seem lithe. The fast (28 millisecond) hard disk

was holding things back as the package darted to and from it. This criticism does not apply to its compiled applications, however, which now run much faster than previously. More serious criticism is being levelled at Ashton-Tate over the new features of the application for local area network use and for minicomputer-type database queries. SQL, for structured query language, was developed by IBM during the mid--19705, and first used commercially in 1979. It has become a database-language standard in the world of minicomputers and mainframes. It has been introduced to dBASE, and is to be introduced to Paradox, so that companies with minicomputers, mainframes, and personal computers can standardise database development. It is a relational database and language. Ashton-Tate describes the concept this way: “In a relational database and language, all data is defined in a single table or set of tables.” SQL provides a small and concise set of commands allowing the defining, display and updating of the information in the tables. There are fewer than 30 commands in SQL. The new version of dBASE allows the user to switch between two modes. The first mode has dBASE IV commands. The second has SQL commands, and some dBASE IV commands. The software provides for both singleuser and network support of SQL. Under a network, this means that when more than one user is running dBASE IV, data in tables is automatically locked during SQL operations that insert, update, or delete data. These are Ashton-Tate’s good intentions, at least. A tiny Californian rival, QuadBASE Systems, which markets an SQL interface for dBASE Lotus 1-2-3 data files called dQuery has alleged that dBASE IV is inaccurate under several SQL statements.

Ashton-Tate has responded to the public criticism, acknowledging that

“there are some problems that exist under specific circumstances.” When a query under SQL asks whether something exists or not and the file has more than 5000 records, an error may occur. It may also return the wrong number of records in data files that are not quite in sorted order, but are more than 95 per cent sorted. This can occur in files that are frequently up-dated in dBASE IV’s own dBASE language. It seems that it just misses the first record. Ashton-Tate says release 1.1 of dBASE IV will not have these bugs, and in the meantime, the errors and solutions will be widely disseminated by the company. The critics have also niggled that the dBASE IV does not have full SQL, that it is too slow, and hogs too much memory. A more serious criticism is that work stations in networks will need extended memory, and from a specific manufacturer, to run dBASE IV in SQL mode. How does dBASE IV shape up over all? The single user already with dBASE (and a hard disk) would be wrong to miss the up-date at the reasonable upgrade price. Any single user with an AT and hard disk and seeking a friendly environment to develop systems, or to learn to develop applications, should be pleased with dBASE IV. The contract developer or software firm that has moved off to Clipper or something similar, may be tempted to return to the old flavour. Those who want to run the application on a network, and in SQL mode, should proceed with caution. It may be a month or two before all the bugs are out. Paradox 3, released this month by Borland, is a strong competitor. It does not yet have the SQL interface, and so the dBASE bugs should not be used as points in favour of Paradox. Ashton-Tate’s greatest weapon is the huge number of confirmed dBASE users. At the upgrade price, most of them are likely to stay in the fold. New users have a wide choice, but dBASE IV will stay in the selection range.

Ordinary users can develop applications