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From: gus@Shasta.ARPA (Gus Fernandez)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Interlace database
Message-ID: <110@Shasta.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 22-Feb-86 16:28:05 EST
Article-I.D.: Shasta.110
Posted: Sat Feb 22 16:28:05 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Feb-86 03:46:38 EST
References: <322@ucbjade.BERKELEY.EDU> <1850@trwrba.UUCP>
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Organization: Stanford University
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> I have had Interlace for about two weeks, and from what I have seen so far, it
> is a very powerful database.  It is the easiest relational data base I have
> seen for the Mac, especially in using the relational features.
> 

Interlace is not a relational database. It is a network database with some
relational capabilities built in. While certain operations are easy to do,
others are much harder and often require a complete re-thinking of your
problem.

Our specific application that lead me to this conclusion was a task where I
had two disk catalog files, each with about 700 entries, which were generated
by the Q&D catalog program. We needed to corrolate these two lists, and
others generated in the same way, to find which files were unique to one list
and which were duplicates. Unfortunately, Interlace is very bad at linking
two relations which have the same structure. I finally gave up, but my friend
who I was helping says he was able to do it, but it required a completely
different approach which was not intuitive.

I have yet to see a Mac database which is both truly relational and easy to
use. 

							Gus Fernandez