moriarty@fluke.UUCP (Sally Weaks) (07/11/85)
I'm forwarding (with permission) a friends review of the new Omnis III Database for the Mac, which has both relational and hierarchal modes. Here it is: ------------------------------------------ I like it. It is a bit peculiar (the programing is all done through clicking buttons rather than with an editor), but extremely powerful. Much better than dBase I think, though I haven't used dBase much. There are 60 numeric variables, and one string variable, which isn't as bad as it seems, because each variable is actually an array of length 120. (Pointing to the right element may be tricky, but it is possible.) It is a huge program. 290k. I can only get it to run on my single drive mac by putting on a minimal system disk (all of 1k left over!) and since the fonts they use are Chicago and Monaco 12, the text looks terrible. I also get to do a fair amount of disk swapping, but not intolerable. With 2 drives you could manage to handle a fairly large data base. You can define your own menus pretty easily, along with alert boxes and some buttons. No choice of fonts. Maximum field length is odd - you can declare a text field to be 79 characters, but on the input format, 60 is the most it will accept. You could concievably use the extra space to keep hidden information by using the string functions, but I don't know why you would want to. Speed seems ok, though it's hard for me to tell since I keep getting interupted by disk swaps. I also haven't had time to actually enter a lot of data for it to search. It is not really a good database for idle searching. To get it to do a search or a sort, you have to fill out a search or report format. Not as convenient as Overvue in that respect, but you can't have everything. And you could probably write your query language to make things easier. The manual is an odd mix of very good and so-so. The tutorial is fine, and leads you by the hand through a sample database, first using it, then designing it. There is a large index, though not a very useful one - for example, they refer to programs as 'sequences', hierarchies as 'connections', etc. Hierarchy and relation aren't in the index anywhere, and nowhere in the manual do they actually explain what they are. I think they really intend for programmers to develop the turn-key applications, and the users to not look too closely. The reference section is all right, though I wish they had gone into more detail on a lot of it. They tend to give examples with no explanation. In spite of that, I expect I'll be fairly fairly good at it all in a couple of weeks of work. At any rate, this is probably going to become the dBase for the Mac. I hope they'll add a little more font flexibiliy (There is no excuse for not allowing Monaco 9 in order to get more than 60 characters across a page), and maybe some better editing-debugging for the 'sequences' but there is really no contest between this and MacLion. And I haven't heard even vague rumors of another one. The only thing that may kill it is the company; XXXX called them to ask for a demo, or something so she could try to sell it, and they didn't seem too anxious to do business. I've heard other reports of the Blythe people not being particularly nice or helpful. It would be a shame if a bunch of managers killed a good program. (Cheap, too - I've seen it discounted for about $260). Sally Weaks, uw-june!phatvax!WEAKS