jonh@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM (Jon Howell) (04/05/89)
I want to allow my dad to keep a database of his 2000 book (and ever-growing :-) library on my CoCo3 Level II system. I'll be getting a hard drive soon, so it will actually be practical. ;-) I figure he shouldn't need more than a K per book, (Probably a half K would do nicely) so he could fit his database now into about 2M. That'll leave me 5.5M (Ok, a small drive. I'll upgrade. :-). Soo, this is where I get advice. I have an ADDS terminal for him (and I'll be adding a few serial ports so there'll be room for him and my modem) so I never have to relinquish my RGB monitor for dirty text work. :-) My question: Should I write or buy? Is there a base out there capable of handling his needs? What he'd like to do is have a few permanent fields on each book plus a variable- record field, 'keywords'. Then he could look up a list of books with keyword foo or by author foo or published in a certain year. And, when he had manually pared down the list as well as merging it with others, he could have the database write the list out to a file in programmable formats, either an mroff bibliography page source, a finished bibliography, a numbered list, etc.. Can I buy a program to pull all this off? What's the best? What's fast? If no database will allow formatted exports, could I get one that will just export lists and I'd write a shortie to format the lists? And finally, if I buy, what will run on the ADDS? Does everything have CoCo screen codes inserted all over the place? Gracias en advancio, (That was *Spanish*, heh heh.. :-) --Jon -- ...!tektronix!tekgen!jonh (503) MAK-SEMA Jon Howell | Q: How come they never // // // _ __ _ . . . . ___ . _ | play that on the radio? // // // / \(_ __ (_) |\/| /| |\ | | /| / | A: They should. // // // \_/__) / | | /"| | \| _|_ /"| \_ | --Dave Barry
mdg@macs.UUCP (Mark Griffith) (04/07/89)
In article <4273@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM>, jonh@tekgen.BV.TEK.COM (Jon Howell) writes: > I want to allow my dad to keep a database....... > > Can I buy a program to pull all this off? What's the best? What's fast? > If no database will allow formatted exports, could I get one that will just > export lists and I'd write a shortie to format the lists? > Does everything have CoCo screen codes inserted all over the place? As far as I have seen, none of the database software written for the CoCo would have the ability to write format properly on the screen of your terminal. You might want to investigate SCULPTOR or the databse offering from Clearbrook Software (I can't remember the name off hand). Both of these packages were designed to work with OSK machines which must use an external terminal so the ability *should* be there in the OS9 Level II packages as well. In either case, these are much more capable packages than things like OS-9 Profile (eeeek!). Your other alternative is to write it yourself in BASIC09, but then it must be specific to your terminal as the screen control codes for it would need to be imbedded in the code. Possibly another route would be to write it in "C" and use the termcap library that is available through the Compuserve OS9 Forum, or Pete Lyall by leaving a message here. Hope all this helps. /\/\ark