englandr@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Scott Englander) (04/06/89)
Well, a couple of weeks ago, i posted this query. Thanks much to all who
responded -- i'm well on the way to making a decision. (I couldn't
resist including additional relevent postings from comp.sys.mac).
********Original message****************************
I'm seeking recommendations for a Mac database.
The application: About 10 tables (files), with 1-20 fields per record;
the largest file will have 5000-10000 records, the others much smaller
(< 500); one-to-many and many-to-many links between files. The users
are starting out inexperienced, but will have access to the developer
(me).
The hardware: Mac SE/30, 2Mb ram, 40 Mb HD.
The ones i'm looking into are DBase Mac (saw an impressive demo),
FoxBase+, 4th Dimension, Double Helix II, and Oracle. Any others? Any
of these i should avoid?
******************************************************
---- Responses -----
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 89 08:23:16 PST
From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Here's what I know, which comes from some experience and
from a fairly recent review article in MacWorld.
The two fastest are FoxBase and McMax, which you don't list;
FoxBase is supposed to be slightly faster than McMax. Both
of them are supposed to be an order of magnitude faster
than the others.
Both FoxBase and McMax are based on dBASE III+. FoxBase is
supposed to have a much better implementation of Mac-type
features, though McMax 2.0 has tried to implement some of
these (I have McMax. At the time I bought it the only
alternative was dBASEMac and luckily I was warned off
that product.)
If you have a strong dBASE background, as I do, one of these
two will probably be your choice. McMax is cheaper, especially
if you buy it direct from the company at an educational
discount (though I've seen it retailed for not much more); I
think FoxBase is about twice the price. If you have to learn
a new command language in any case, you might want to consider
one of the others, but these two are still the fastest.
I have a ten or so table database with about 6,000 records
per table in McMax with pretty good speed on my Mac II with
5 megs memory and an internal hard disk. What I did was to
take existing dBASE II programs from CP/M and adapt them
to dBASE III+. I haven't bothered to implement Mac features
but could if I really wanted; McMax 2.0 just came out.
In case you're interested, the history as I understand it is
that McMax originated within Ashton Tate. When they switched
course toward dBASEMac (which has a command language totally
different from earlier dBASE), it was sold off to the company
now selling it.
Good luck.
Steve Goldfield
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 89 13:35 PST
From: GGIERGIEL@vmsd.cf.uci.edu
You should look at Reflex+ for Macintosh. I have been using it for
almost a year now. It is not very well suited for beginners, but I
like its flexibility and its very robust engine. I have looked
at others, but was put off by their general clumsiness and rigidity.
Reflex is the only relational database where you can set up your
model in less than a couple of minutes. However, such power can
be dangerous in hands of beginners. That is you can not hide your
database behind bunch of dialoques meant to be operated by bunch of
ignorant users.
Some problems:
a) Excessive screen redrawing,
b) sorting is not properly implemented
c) inability to export nested "repeating collections"
d) record delete will delete all records if the entry screen
contains list of keys in repeating collection,
and the one I dislike the most:
One of the program segments is named EatShitA, and as you have
guessed by now, it deals with user input. To see it use any of
Mac disassemblers. I find this plainly rude.
P.S. Program has very good documentation.
Jerzy Giergiel UCI, Physics
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 89 14:39:44 PST
From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Nantucket Corporation
12555 W. Jefferson Blvd., Suite 300
Los Angeles, CA 90066
1-213-390-7923
makes and sells McMax.
I don't know if anyone else out there is using McMax and has
updated to version 2.0, but I've been finding some annoying
bugs and not getting any response from Nantucket. So, as a public
service and in case anyone has fixes, I decided the post the ones
I've found so far.
1. @,SAY left you on the next line (for instance if you used
a ? command) in Version 1.0; in 2.0 you are left on the same
line just after the last character displayed. There is really
more of an inconsistency than a bug, but it is annoying to
fix because you have to put in new @,SAYs to correct screen
position. Anyway, what was the point in changing something like
this and why didn't they warn us about it.
I faxed this one to Nantucket about a month ago
and received no response.
2. XCMD ("Say", "Whatever") crashes McMax. I haven't reported
this one, but you'd expect them to have tested it since the new
manual supplement repeats it several times.
3. In writing to an alternate file with ? lines, McMax 2.0
prepended junk, which looked like internal McMax code, namely,
several command names separated by periods, which added about
100 or so characters to each line. I phoned Nantucket about
this one twice and didn't get a call back. I also faxed it
to them and got a fax back asking for my telephone number,
but have received no other response.
In general, when you phone Nantucket technical support, you almost
always get a busy signal. I've found I have to go through their
main switchboard to have any hope of getting through. Then they
don't phone back.
To be fair, there are some good improvements in McMax 2.0. I have
better control over my printer with the new STYLE parameter,
though there is still no way I can see to set form length (I'm
printing on 2-inch labels which don't therefore factor into
11-inch pages evenly--my solution is to skip one out of every 12
labels). Also, I'm not paying Nantucket for technical support,
because I wouldn't need to call them except for the bugs. But
that doesn't seem a valid excuse for not returning calls
reporting bugs.
I wonder if anyone from Nantucket is out there reading
comp.sys.mac and wants to respond.
Steve Goldfield
From: mikey@ontek.UUCP (Mike Lee)
Date: 31 Mar 89 17:51:15 GMT
IMHO, 4D blows away any other database programming environment.
It is also one of the toughest to program, IF YOU WANT TO GET THE MOST
POSSIBLE PERFORMANCE OUT IF IT. By this I mean that you can print
stuff out in any format you like, validate user input to the letter and
generally customize it to the point where 4D knows as much about the
data and what it should look like as the programmer does. This takes
time, as usual.
On the other hand, the average Joe can scrape together a few layouts
and just type in some data and PRESTO there is a database.
I may be bragging, but I think it should only take about six months
to get used to 4D's quirks. Pressure your consultant to get stuff
working, even if the output isn't perfectly formatted and the user
has to use buttons instead of menus.
The problems you are having with Mr/Ms. consultant may not be entirely
the his/her fault. 4D is buggy in many ways, but in my experience with
it, there is ALWAYS a workaround, but you have to have the guts to call
Acius and get it. Into this category fall many of the features that
make 4D the best. The text boxes in layouts can be buggy and the way
that your code is tied into the layouts is very non-intuitive, even if
it isn't buggy. The menu bar stuff is bizarre, but again, it will work
once you get the hang of it. One thing I never tried was multi-user
use of the same database. If that is part of the application I could
see many headaches just waiting to happen.
I switched to various other projects and haven't used 4D in about a
year. I am almost certain many of the bugs I had to work around have
been fixed since then. Make sure your consultant has enough in his
budget to get the most recent rev of 4D.
I must add that I found customer support at Acius to be among the best
I have encountered.
Mike Lee
From: rs5o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Randall Knowles Smith)
Date: 1 Apr 89 19:57:07 GMT
I'm nearly finished with a 4th Dim. database here at CMU.
My thoughts and needs follow:
Comments on 4th Dimension:
The manual looks very good, and is quite authoritatively wrong or
misleading in some parts. Not many, just enough to drive a beginner
mad. Experts in Database programming probably wouldn't have any
problems. Also, the program can be very slow at times; especially when
running in a multi-user environment off a server. And this leads me into:
Questions:
This faster version of 4th Dim--Any due date at all? Is it DEFINATELY
coming out? I'm somewhat desparate, because, you see, I'm a college
student, just wrote my first 4th Dim. application, and it's SLOW.
It's a grading program, and the TA's using it (6 of them) are already
complaining. Next semester we'll have 10 times as many TA's and
students. My name is known, I don't want to be lynched. So, I need
help speeding the thing up. A new version of 4th dim. would be nice,
but barring that, can anything be done? The major bottleneck at the
moment is disk access. Ideas on how others have solved this problem
(loading everything into memory, etc) would be greatly appreciated
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 89 06:59:44 EDT
From: Alexis Rosen <cucard!ccnysci!alexis@columbia.edu>
Scott,
This subject comes up once every few months. If you have archives you might
want to check them for old articles by me. Little has changed since FoxBase
was released early in 1988 except that FoxBase has improved dramatically,
further enhancing its position as the clear leader. (And 4D has not, further
confirming its position as a total loser.)
I've written >.5MBytes of code in Omnis, >100KB in 4D, and approaching
250KB in FoxBase. This is what I do for a living.
FoxBase+/Mac is the first DBMS I have ever actually enjoyed using on ANY
computer (MS-DOS, Mac, large systems).
FB is anywhere from 6 to 200 times faster than the others (that is NO typo!)
The programming environment is a joy, both the user and programmer interfaces
are elegant and far more maclike than 4D's. It's amazingly clean and bug-free,
in strong contrast to 4D and Omnis.
I have an alpha of the new v2.0. The report generator is absolutely amazing.
It has many other new features as well. It will be available late April or
early May.
There is (unfortunately) no real competition (it would take a miracle to
separate me from FoxBase now, but I'd like to see competition, just to keep
them on their toes [not that they need external pressure from other companies,
so far]). 4D is a nightmare, Omnis is almost as bad (and the company is
basically defunct), Helix is amazing technology but not really good when
you need to write code, and dBase Mac is an elegant but useless product for
real-world applications.
Oracle is very interesting, but you DON'T want to get near it unless you are
trying to talk to Oracle on some other machine. There's just no percentage
in it (unless you are hopelessly wedded to SQL).
.
.
I did give Helix somewhat short shrift in my previous note. I don't use it much
anymore because I really need procedural, modular code. But if you don't
really need to write code, Helix is wonderful. And there are some cases where
you'd need to write code in other products but not Helix.
---
Alexis Rosen
From: alexis@ccnysci.UUCP (Alexis Rosen)
Date: 5 Apr 89 09:17:40 GMT
In article <UYBGaHy00WB50oe7cW@andrew.cmu.edu> rs5o+@andrew.cmu.edu
(Randall Knowles Smith) writes:
>Comments on 4th Dimension:
>The manual looks very good, and is quite authoritatively wrong or
>misleading in some parts. Not many, just enough to drive a beginner
>mad. Experts in Database programming probably wouldn't have any
>problems. Also, the program can be very slow at times; especially when
>running in a multi-user environment off a server. And this leads me into:
That's not all. Often the manual is right and the program's wrong. Like
when it crashes. Which it does frequently, especially in multi-user.
Also, you're wrong. Even experts can go nuts trying to piece together
the crazily implemented input loop.
>Questions:
>This faster version of 4th Dim--Any due date at all? Is it DEFINATELY
>coming out? I'm somewhat desparate, because, you see, I'm a college
>student, just wrote my first 4th Dim. application, and it's SLOW.
It's definitely coming out. It will definitely be faster. It will
definitely almost certainly probably I think maybe hopefully might just
barely make it out before 1990. :-)
Actually, I don't know what the holdup is. It should have been out a while
ago, but maybe they decided to debug this version.
>It's a grading program, and the TA's using it (6 of them) are already
>complaining. Next semester we'll have 10 times as many TA's and
>students. My name is known, I don't want to be lynched. So, I need
>help speeding the thing up. A new version of 4th dim. would be nice,
>but barring that, can anything be done? The major bottleneck at the
>moment is disk access. Ideas on how others have solved this problem
>(loading everything into memory, etc) would be greatly appreciated
Well. You can get a faster disk. The best ones are the full-height CDC
(now known as Imprimis) Wrens. Use accelerators, if you can.
The only real answer, though, is the upgrade I took. I scrapped 4D in
the middle of a big project, wrote off a month of my time, and used
FoxBase. That was a VERY BIG DECISION. Then I made up my entire loss in
TWO WEEKS! That made me feel a lot better. The difference is not to be
believed. Fox really is 6 to 200 times faster than 4D. The most amazing
thing is that this difference also applied to coding time (though not
quite as dramatically). A large project that would have taken me three
months to do in 4D got done in one month in FB. And the result was MUCH
better. Faster, bug-free, didn't crash because the database engine went
to lunch, and the user interface was lots better.
Fox's big problem was the weak (read IBMish) report generator. But I had
no major problems producing macish reports by programming. This is not
hugely desireable, though, which is why they put a most amazing report
generator into V2.0. The first Beta is finally here (Yeah!) and it's
quite stable (unlike the Alphas). It should be out in early May. And Fox
always meets their shipping deadlines.
Realize that I've been hearing "Wait for 4D 1.1... 1.5... 2.0" for longer
that FoxBase/Mac has existed! In that time Fox has introduced a major
product and released one bug-free major upgrade. In four weeks time they
will introduce another equally significant upgrade.
Y'know, I almost feel sorry for Guy...
---
Alexis Rosen
From: alexis@ccnysci.UUCP (Alexis Rosen)
Date: 4 Apr 89 22:31:23 GMT
Steve Goldfield complains about bugs in McMax 2.0
The only choice is to get FoxBase. It is infinitely better. It will also run
all your programs from 1.0 (99% likelyhood you won't have to make any
modifications, and if you do they'll be minimal).
McMax will never (that's in "computer time") be a good product because they
are devoting all their energy to the DOS market. In contrast, there will
have been TWO very major upgrades to FoxBase in one year, between upgrades
of the Fox PC product.
Especially if you are writing a lot of code, FoxBase is worth almost any price.
If you have McMax and you're poor, buy FoxBase anyway. It's worth skipping
lunches for. (In the time you'll save doing developement work, you could get
a second job to pay for it...) And it's not so expensive- $395 list.
FoxBase is nas close to bug-free as I've ever seen a substantial application
get. It's also the first DMBS developement environment I've ever used on any
system that was actually a pleasure to use.
I am not affiliated with Fox Software except as an extremely satisfied tester
and user of their software.
---
Alexis Rosen
--
- Scott