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From: fisher@sc2a.unige.ch (Markus Fischer)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Free Text Databases
Summary: Why not a word processor ?
Message-ID: <76@sc2a.unige.ch>
Date: 30 May 89 16:05:57 GMT
References: <1158@itivax.iti.org>
Organization: University of Geneva, Switzerland
Lines: 42

In article <1158@itivax.iti.org>, kam@itivax.iti.org (Keith A. McNabb) writes:
> Would anyone be able to recommend a good, efficient, and fairly
> powerful FREE TEXT database for a PC-AT compatible (MS-DOS) or 
> Sun/UNIX environment?  It should have no restrictions on record 
> length and should allow pre-existing flat ASCII files to be 
> easily incorporated.  At the same time, it should support the 
> definition of various fields, so that searches may be more
> selectively qualified, and it should support numeric operators.

It really depends on what you want to do with the data.  I have now some
experience with sequential `coded' databases, for which I use a dBASE-like
program, and with bibliographical databases, as I'm responsible for an
abstract service in the field of archaeology.

As I did't find a good and cheap database system allowing character fields
with variable length (one fields is the author : 20 to 200 char.; another
is the actual abtract : 1 to 100 lines of text ! ), I simply used the
word processor I was accustumed to : WordPerfect.  This might seem a little
strange, but it really has a subset of database functions : sort, extract
by conditions, numerical variables and modify structure...  Of course, one
doesn't expect full statistical functions, or even calculations...

The main problem is actually that the structure of the data cannot be defined,
which means that the user must be carful to put each field in the right place.
In other words, you will have trouble if several people are to enter or edit
the data.

The main advantage is of course the quality of printouts : you are working
with a read word processor !  (i.e., the fields can contain formatting
codes...)

I hope I haven't annoyed anyone with these views; this wasn't mean to be
some kind of advertisement, either.  For the time being, I haven't found
anything as efficient as a `text-database' for text-processing...

Markus Fischer                -|--|--|--|--|--|--I   Department of Anthropology
                        -|--|--|--|--|--|--|-(#)-I   University of Geneva
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black (#) to kill ! --|--|-(#)(_)(_)(_)(#)(#)(_)(_)  fisher@sc2a.unige.ch
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