abulloch@violet.berkeley.edu.UUCP (02/12/86)
Today's New York Times has a review article on a new relational database called Interlace, from Singular Software in San Jose Ca. The reviewer speaks well of it, and it is not expensive (under $100). There has been a certain amount of discussion about good databases for the Mac recently, and so far as I can see no-one has suggested that there is anything that is _really_ good and powerful yet. Has anyone seen and used Interlace? In particular, will it do well for keeping bibliographies (and accompanying notes etc.) and sorting them in multiple useful ways? What are other people's recommendations for this kind of job? Anthony Bulloch Dept. of Classics Dwinelle Hall UCBerkeley Ca. 94720 (415-642-4218) ===================
carlile@trwrba.UUCP (Donald E. Carlile) (02/21/86)
[eat if you must this old grey line, but spare the rest of the message] 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. I haven't had time to make a large data base, but its performance so far is very good. The report generating capabilities are excellent. It searches very easily. I don't know about its suitability as a bibliography tracker, but I think it would do the job. In reports you can sort on any field you want. If you want the database sorted differently you can (_I_think_) change the key field. The standard disclaimers apply. I have nothing to do with Singular except as a happy customer. Don Carlile ...trwrb!trwrba!carlile
gus@Shasta.ARPA (Gus Fernandez) (02/23/86)
> 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