jim@wavetek.UUCP (Jim Weitenhagen) (07/11/85)
I am looking for a comparison of commercially available database
managers for the IBM PC - specifically dBase III and RBase 4000
and 5000.
I am posting this for my wife, who works in a personnel department.
They recently acquired an XT and a program which purported to be a
"complete human resources information system". Well, it isn't, and now
they are looking for something to supplement or possibly even replace
it. They believe that Lotus 1-2-3 and a database manager will fill
their needs, which are mainly in the category of maintaining employee
records, extracting information for the budget process and union
negotiations, etc.
They need to keep records for about 1700 employees. The currently
existing data files consume about 2.3 Mb of disk space, with the
largest file being 880 Kb.
Their specific performance concerns are:
* ability to accept data from external programs - They would like to
input the data from their current program to save having to type
it all in again. The data consists of fixed length strings of
ASCII, without delimiters between the fields.
* flexibility - Their current program did not fit into the pre-existing
manual system very well.
* speed - Their current program takes literally hours to sort employee
records.
* ease of use - Their current program is heavily menued and you can't
bypass the menus when you know exactly what you want to do and
how to do it -- this makes it cumbersome and slow. On the other
hand, my wife is a relative novice at computers.
* can it cope with the amount of data they have? Or are they
unrealistic to expect any program on a micro to cope with this
much data?
* is there good vendor support?
They are mainly interested in dBase III and RBase because they are
fairly well-known (bigger is better). But comments on any other
database manager would be welcome also.
Please reply by mail, and thanks in advance.
Jim Weitenhagen ...!{uw-beaver,microsoft}!fluke!wavetek!jim
dBase III, RBase 4000, RBase 5000 and Lotus 1-2-3 are all trademarked, I
expect.