File managers for the Commodore 64 - Whole Earth Software Catalog - Version 1.3 - evaluation

JOHN SEWARD: This article is supposed to be about file management systems for the Commodore 64, though not one of the five products to be discussed calls itself this. With one exception, they all prefer to be known as database management systems. Escalating hype has apparently eliminated the former term from softwae marketing vocabulary. All five systems are, howeveR, actually file management systems, in accord with the notion that a database system accesses several or many different interrelated files, while a file management system works with only one file at a time.

The five systems I'm going to talk about are F.C.M. from Continental Softwae (F.C.M. stands for filing, Cataloging, and Mailing labels -- the most humbly, and accurately, named program). THE CONSULTANT (previously titled DELPHI's ORACLE), from Batteries Included THE MANAGER from Commodore, BATA BASE 64 from Entech, and DATABASE MANAGER from Mirage Concepts. The same general ground is covered by all of these programs, byt they vary widely in particulars.

Assuming is not a consideration, THE MANAGER and DATABASE MANAGER come out on top. But it really depends on what you plan to do with a file manager. If you ae going to beprinting a lot of mailing labels, for example, and you want ease and flexibility in how you format those labels, then your best bet may actually be F.C.M., if you can live with its other considerable limitations.

F.C.M. from Continental Software is written in Commodore 64 interpreted BASIC. HIT CONTROL BREAK and the program will interrupt and let you look at it, even make changes if you like. It feels like a home-brew effort, done to keep track of someone's record collection, and then dressed up for the mass market. F.C.M. only allows 24 characters in a field, not enough for many individual or company names, addresses, or even names of record albums. there are only 10 fields allowed in a record cannot contain more than 132 characters of information. These are severe limitations.

In many ways the most solid, competent performer of the group is THE CONSULTANT. There are virtually no limits, on the sizes of fields, records, or fileS. It gives you a lot of flexibility and power for selecting, sorting, and printing reports. It does have a couple of annoying quirks. The only type of field that accepts both letters and numbers is a key field, but key fields require an index to be maintained for them. This means that if you want to store alphanumeric information, you have to declare everything a key field, which takes up space and time. Another problem is on label printing. A maximum of two fields is allowed on a line of a label, which means that you can't put city, state, and zip code on the same line of a mailing label -- an absurd restriction.

THE MANAGER is another solid performer which also fhas a few strange shortcomings, the two main ones being that it doesn't let you print mailing labels at all and it requires you to use all capital letters, no lower case allowed. Also slightly troubling is the fact that THE MANAGER only allows a maximum of 40 characters per field, ample for most names and addresses but not for notes. If you don't care about mailing labels or lwoer case letters, this is an otherwise adequately featured system.

En-Tech's DATA BASE 64 is another interpreted BASIC, home-brew, fairly primitive program, but with F.C.M. it shares a label-printing capability superior to any of the other programs. For some reason the printing of mailing labels is considered to be relatively unimportant by the publishers of most of these programs, although would bet that mailing lists are the single most common applciation of file management systems.

DATABASE MANAGER is probably the best all-around system. It has plenty of power and flexibility on the front end for entering, selecting, and sorting ddata, and very good label printing and features.

I would have to say that none of these programs is a real knowkcout, but any of them might be the right combination for some particular application. If i wanted to put the FEATURES Chart in a file using one of these programs, I would have to eliminate F.C.M. and DATA BASE 64 right away. They couldn't handle the number of different fields, one for each characteristic. i would also have to eliminate THE CONSULTANT and THE MANAGER. The only program that will let me print all those fancy columns is probably DATABASE MANAGER. On the other hand, if you absolutely have to sort something in reverse order, you'll have to buy THE MANAGEr; it's the only one with a descending sort option.

In short, there is no clear-cut winner in the battle of the file managers. You just have to count your money, figure out which features you really need, and make a choice.

COPYRIGHT 1985 Point Foundation
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