peter@aucs.UUCP (Peter Steele) (01/08/88)
I have a question: We are currently developing a faculty
database containing information on all faculty at Acadia. It will be
used for generating reports like "a list of all profs eligible for
sabattical next year." We've got a large portion of the database
done in dBase III+ (although extensive changes are likely); our new boss
feels SciMate would be better (he knows SciMate but doesn't know dBase;
I only know dBase). Any comments? The database consists of four files
with common keys. dBase isn't bad, but is SciMate better for this sort
of thing? The one thing I see that SciMate has is the free form text
searching. Presently, dBase has memo fields but these cannot be searched
or queried in any way. For example, we use memo fields to describe
faculty members' research interests. We couldn't, however, generate a list
of all faculty studying, for example, some particular subject because
these memo fields are so restricted. It sounds like SciMate would be
better for something like this.
We need to make a decision and any comments would be appreciated.
--
Peter Steele Acadia Univ. Wolfville NS Canada B0P1X0 (902)542-2201x121
UUCP:{uunet|watmath|utai|garfield}dalcs!aucs!Peter BITNET:Peter@Acadia
-------------Internet:Peter%Acadia.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU-------------cline@pnet01.cts.com (Ben Humphreys) (01/10/88)
Memo querying is easy whenusing the Clipper dBASE compiler. Clipper treats
memos as one big string. Therefore, lines like
COUNT ALL FOR "TEACHER" $ UPPER(memo_field) TO total
work just fine. We did a project where this sort of thing was required, ended
up going with Clipper and had great success.
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