Msg: 6403 *Conference*
03-30-96 15:02:30
From: RICHARD HANSON
To : ERVIN MILLER
Subj: REPLY TO MSG #6401 (PGMS)
You are correct ... genealogy is a database application. In this case, you will probably want a fully relational database program vs. a flat file, but then it all depends on how look at your data. A mailing list would be an axample of a flat file. Each record holds a unique entity and the file is not related at any level to another file. Your phone bill is an example of the result, or report, from a relational database. One file contains your billing information. Another, totally separate file contains transactions you generate each time you make a phone call. At the end of the month, they [the phone company] relats the two files to generate a vertual file called a phone bill. The generation involved looking up your phone number from the first file, then matching it with all occurance [records] attributable to that number from the second file. I'll leave the subject here and let you thing about it, except to add that TBase on the Ulitmate ROM II, is a fully relational database. The database on the SuperROM is flatfile, as is CRDFIL ROM and PC versions. I suspect that most of the database programming in the library is also flatfile. Back to you ... -Rick-