russell@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell J Fulton;ccc032u) (09/05/90)
I am involved with a project (data base of recent law cases in New Zealand) at the moment there are aprox 7000 cases from the last 4 years. The database contains identification information about the hearing, (name of parties, date, court, judge etc.), a very brief summary of the judgment, and a keyword field (eg. property law). The data base is a comercial product and is in use by several of the larger law firms as well as the Police. There are approx 300 new cases added and 300 corrections per month. We are currently using INMAGIC software ( under MSDOS) to index and search the database. The summary of the case is completely indexed. I.e. one can search for the occurance of any word in the body of the summary and key fields. INMAGIC has several undesirable features: 1/ Indexing is extreamly slow, and speed depends on the number of items in the database. It now takes 2 minutes to add an item on a 12MHz AT. 2/ There is no journaling mechanism to allow us to record changes to records. 3/ Threre are short commings in its searching abilities. In paricular it can only search one database at a time. 4/ It does not run on Mac. (And some lawyer love their Macs, Yes some lawyers do have some sense!! :-)) Items 1 & 2 realy hurt because it means that the only practical way to supply monthly updates to clients is to ship them a DOS BACKUP of the entire 10MB of the database. (It would take 20 hours to load the update if we distributed the updates as ascii text to be read in.) To the point, finally. Is there anybody out there who uses INMAGIC who has found way of addressing these problems? (We have had a look at 7.2 and after initial hope were disappointed.) Does anybondy know of other dbs that can handle indexing of text fields. (We Know about BRS and in fact have a couple of clients that use it but it is too expensive for most of our clients, besides it runs under Xenix.) Russell Fulton, Computer Centre, University of Auckland. -- Russell Fulton, Computer Centre, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Internet rj_fulton@aukuni.ac.nz.
tony@jassys.UUCP (Tony Holden) (09/07/90)
In article <1990Sep5.032855.21748@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>, russell@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell J Fulton;ccc032u) writes: > (We Know about BRS and in fact have a couple of clients that use it but it > is too expensive for most of our clients, besides it runs under Xenix.) We have BRS at the law firm I work for. Yucky Pooh. I'm not impress by it at all. You have to use dot commands that looks like troff in order for BRS to find something. They do have a DOS version I'm told. -- Tony Holden tony@jassys