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PsL Monthly 1994 June
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PSL Monthly Shareware CD-ROM (June 1994) (Public Software Library).bin
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1994-02-23
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DB-00 Discussion:
"Free-Form" vs "Structured" Database Programs:
The Database section is divided into Free-Form and Structured database
programs. We are often asked what the difference is.
In most database programs, you have to set up "fields" and define maximum field
lengths. For example, in a club membership database, the first two fields might
be first name and last name with, say, 15 character spaces allotted to each. So
if you want to search for a particular last name, the program will look at
character positions 16 through 30 in every record.
In a Free-Form database, data can be entered in any order or form that you want,
as the name implies. If you used such a database to record notes about
individuals and wanted to search for a particular name, the program would have
to search every character of every record, which obviously would be a lot slower
than in the fixed record length file example above.
In fact, you could create a free-form database with almost any word processor by
typing in whatever you want and using the word processor's text search function
to find records.
However, most free-form database programs get around the brute-force search
method by the use of "key fields" - one or more fixed-length fields into which
you can put information for which you would later like to search. In the example
above, you could use one of the fields to record the name. Likewise, some
fixed-record-length database programs let you have a free-form note field in
which you can record random data.
A Structured database program is sometimes referred to as a "list manager",
because lists are usually structured. Programs like PC-File, Wyndfields, File
Express, etc, can easily be used for many kinds of lists, such as mailing
lists, home or business inventory, customer lists, and for cataloging of
books, records, tapes, etc.
Although we have many specialized list managers in PsL (eg: video tape
cataloging programs), if you spend a few minutes learning to use a generalized
database program, you can easily create databases of any type without having
to learn a completely new program for each list of things you want to keep
track of.