CFOG's PIP, June 1988, Volume 7 No. 4, Whole No. 66, page 52

PC-File 80 Review

[Your Editor is also President of KaftorWare Corporation, exclusive licensed distributors of PC-File 80, a CP/M flat database management program. Accordingly I have been reluctant to write about it. I am taking the liberty of publishing the comments of Sypko Andreae, former publisher of Morrow Owners Review, which appeared in the May/June 1988 issue of the BAMDUA-BAKUP News published by the combined Bay Area Micro Decisions Users Ass'n and Bay Area Kaypro Users and Programmers. My comments are in brackets. -- bhc]

Let me tell you something about my experiences with PC-FILE 80, the database that just came out for CP/M. I have been using it for four different databases, both small and large, and generally I am pleased. But, as it often goes when you use a program for a while, you start hitting the limitations more often as you gain experience. So it is with this program.

The manual has 63 pages of concise prose and is quite good. The complete text is divided into tiny numbered sections so it's easy to find things with the help of the extensive table of contents and/or the eleven page index. I would rate it as a good job that could possibly be improved a little in the way it is organized, but not by much.

A summary of the features is honestly put forward on page 54 and shows the most obvious limitations right away: No more than 40 fields, up to 65 characters per field but that shrinks back to 25 if you have more than 18 fields. I find that a field of 25 characters is too short for something like an address or a company name. but one of the severest limitations is that the total number of characters in all fields of one record is only 254. That hurts for all but the simplest databases. Why so little is not quite clear to me. In the manual it says, "We hope to raise that limitation in a future release." But elsewhere the authors state that any more work on PC-File 80 will depend on the sales figures of the current version.

PC- File 80 is easy to learn and any novice should have a simple database going within an hour. Then, if you want to elaborate on the database, several nice features help you do that. The most powerful is "cloning" whereby you basically make a complete copy of your current database (including all the data) [or selected records] while making changes in field lengths, adding or deleting fields, even re-arranging fields. After you are through with the cloning process you wind up in the main menu with the newly cloned database in attendance.

All the databases I used with PC-File 80 were created by importing the data from other databases (Personal Pearl, Perfect Filer, or dBase II). That went very smoothly. I also had very little trouble with some exporting experiments, and the trouble was mainly on the other (receiving) end. The main work in importing from another database was in creating the proper report in that other database. [It may be easier to export the files from Perfect Filer with PF2ASCII.COM. See July 1988 Profiles, page 45.]

I was a little disappointed in the speed of PC-File 80. For instance, searching for a record by the content of a field is a bit slow. It isn't too bad for a small database of 200 records or so, but one database of 3,000 records gave me search times of over a minute. Personal Pearl and Filer do this much faster, but on the other hand they allow you only to search on a few indexed fields, while PC-File 80 lets you search on any field, and that is real nice. Moreover, you can search on a substring (scanning across a field), or use a wildcard. You can also use Soundex, where you enter something that sounds like what you are looking for. Great for vaguely remembered last name searches. The only search that is really fast is the one by record number, but the record is assigned by the database program itself and changes after every different sort, so this is not so useful.

If you want to get a report sorted in a certain way you have to first sort the whole database that way, and then execute the report. Sorting times can really ad up: sorting a 3,000 record database with more than 20 fields and sorted in three levels can take most of an hour -- a long time but still a bit faster than Pearl, and a bit slower than Perfect Filer. If you have a relatively small subset, say 100 records out of a database of 3,000, and you need several sorts for that subset only, then it is really much more convenient to clone the subset and then sort it quickly in the various ways you want for your reports.

The other feature you need for reports is subset selection. Example: make a report of all records with zipcode from 90000 to 99999 of which the last names start with an A or an L. This you couldn't do with Pearl which has a very weak subset selection system. With Filer you couldn't do it either, but with PC-File 80 it's a snap. You can make up to 10 logical selection criteria (10 simple Boolean expressions) that you string together with logical "and" and "or". but you can't save your Boolean composition (as you can in Pearl and Filer), so every time you need the same subset of up to ten "Booleans" you have to enter it all over again. That is a drawback.

Designing reports is very easy and can be done in two ways: by following a menu or by editing a file with WS in "N" mode. The latter feature makes it really easy to change a report or to create a new report out of an old one. The reports are quite easy to read because you only have to remember about five symbols to make sense out of them.

There is much more to tell about PC-File 80 which has lots of neat and easy-to-learn features -- like numeric fields for making invoices or checkbook registers -- but space is running out. I will come back to it later. In conclusion I would recommend this program for small databases that have small records and don't have a lot of fancy subset selections for reports. It runs equally fine on a Morrow MD3 or MD11. On an MD2 or Kaypro II [with single sided drives] it will get a little crowded but it should run fine too. You can buy it for $49.95 (plus $5 shipping, and $2 for formats other than Osborne or Kaypro) from KaftorWare Corporation, P.O. Box 1674, Chicago, IL 60690. Even with me rubbing up against its limitations, I still like PC-File 80.