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From: jbayer@ispi.UUCP (Jonathan Bayer)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: CData - the Cheap Data Base Management System
Message-ID: <1120@ispi.UUCP>
Date: 26 Aug 89 12:17:32 GMT
References: <646@levels.sait.edu.au> <191@s5000uunet!s5000> <7401@microsoft.UUCP> <410@bgalli.eds.com> <1989Aug25.102108.21501@ziebmef.mef.org>
Organization: Intelligent Software Products, Inc.
Lines: 39

mdfreed@ziebmef.mef.org (Mark Freedman) writes:


>(Al Steven Books / Software .... Cheap Data Base ... etc.)

>   I bought Al Stevens' earlier book and disk "C Development Tools for the
>IBM PC", and have also grabbed his screen-handling routines published in
>Doctor Dobbs' Journal from Compuserve. To his credit, he did send two bug
>fix postcards for the development tools (hmmm .... better support than some
>expensive products), but I've never cared for the design or crash-prone
>implementation of his libraries.
>    Is the "Cheap Data BAse" more robust than the DDJ routines (I can crash
>data entry simply by inserting characters until the field overflows. of 
>course, an end-user would **NEVER** do such a thing :-)). I can't see
>spending a lot of time debugging his code when commercial products are
>available at such low prices.


CData's data entry is very simple.  The database is a text-based system,
and all data is stored as chars.  The data entry cannot be overflowed. 
The only problem I have found with the system is that the b-tree
routines have some sort of bug which screws up the b-tree files.  I
solved it by replacing the offending routines.

The nice thing about CData is that you can create a schema, and have it
translated into C.  Also, the database-handling routines seem to be
fairly robust.  One point though; it is NOT a multi-user database.

The routines can be changed to handle different types of data without
too much modifications.  All you would have to do is to supply the
appropriate data-entry routines, or at least translation routines from
char to the appropriate data type.


JB
-- 
Jonathan Bayer		Intelligent Software Products, Inc.
(201) 245-5922		500 Oakwood Ave.
jbayer@ispi.COM		Roselle Park, NJ   07204