Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bionet!ames!uhccux!munnari.oz.au!mimir!hugin!augean!sirius!nt!levels!marwk
From: MARWK@levels.sait.edu.au
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: CData - the Cheap Data Base Management System
Message-ID: <1299@levels.sait.edu.au>
Date: 28 Aug 89 14:26:25 GMT
References: <646@levels.sait.edu.au> <191@s5000uunet!s5000> <7401@microsoft.UUCP> <410@bgalli.eds.com> <1989Aug25.102108.21501@ziebmef.mef.org>
Organization: Sth Australian Inst of Technology
Lines: 40

In article <1989Aug25.102108.21501@ziebmef.mef.org>, 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.

I do not have access (I think) to Compuserve, so could you tell me where else
I can get the screen-handling routines from?

What are the 2 bug fixes?  I am unaware of them.


>     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.

The speed with which data can be entered and queried after conceiving a 
data base schema is astonishing.

I have not found any bugs yet, but an earlier posting informed us that there
may be a problem with the BTree indexing when the number of records reached
about 5000 entries - I would like a fix to this rather than using the
alternative routines suggested in that earlier posting.
                    -----------------
I am not entirely happy with the need for entering the data in key fields
in the order on the screen before the automatic search takes place.  Has
anyone altered this?  

Has anyone else made any improvements to CData? Mine was mentioned in an
earlier posting.  I am working on others.

Ray Kennington
School of Mathematics and Computer Studies
South Australian Institute of Technology