2 Databases for Business: 1 Plain and 1 Fancy

For many businesses, the greatest productivity gains from using a personal computer come through database applications. From maintaining a simple mailing list of clients to a complex, interwoven account of sales and inventory, databases store the essential information needed to do business.

Two different approaches to databases on IBM and compatible personal computers are found in DataEase, a $600 program from DataEase International Inc. of Trumbull, Conn., and RapidFile, a $395 package that has just been introduced by Ashton-Tate of Torrance.

DataEase is a fully relational database, meaning that information needed to fill in a blank on one form can be obtained automatically by the program from another file. For instance, if you use DataEase to prepare invoices, it can look up the full name of a product in another file and type it automatically onto the invoice form after you enter a product code number.

RapidFile is a list manager. The only information it can give back to you is the data contained within the file you are using. If you want to see the product name on an invoice created with RapidFile, it must already have been entered into that database.

As in everything in life, there are trade-offs among computer database programs. DataEase is most suited to large, complex applications that will take a good deal of thought and planning to design. Once you have firmly in mind what kinds of forms you want to see on the computer screen, and how they will relate to each other and what kinds of paper reports the data should produce, DataEase makes it relatively simple to create them.

RapidFile, on the other hand, is most suited to maintaining a series of unrelated lists of data. Creating a new database entry form is very quickly done, and finding your data after it is entered is just as quick.

Although fancy forms can be designed, the easiest way to use RapidFile is to enter data in tabular form--name, address, city, state, etc.--stretching across one line of the screen. That line can be as wide as 250 columns of data, incidentally. The computer simply scrolls the screen horizontally to reach the data field you want. In tabular form, the screen displays 17 lines of data, each line corresponding to a separate “record” within the database. (A record contains all the information pertaining to a single entry in a database. It could be the equivalent of a mailing label or a 3-by-5 index card or a multipage application form.)

Two features of RapidFile particularly stand out. When you install the program, you can choose whether it should have pull-down menus of the sort popularized on the Apple Macintosh or horizontal menus that work just like those on Lotus 1-2-3. (I found the latter easier to use.)

The other feature is that data fields--the blank for entering a single item of information such as “name”--don’t have fixed lengths. You can type in as much or as little as you want, so you never have to worry about encountering a name or a city that is too long to fit in the space allotted as in most other database programs, including DataEase. What is controlled in RapidFile is how much of that data field will be displayed or printed. But that is easily altered any time and as many times as you want.

The people at DataEase paid a lot of attention to the dynamics of offices when they designed their program. Access to each data file is controlled through user names and passwords, and within a file, any data field can have up to seven levels of security. That means, for instance, that the clerk who enters the hours each employee works into the payroll database could be prevented from seeing the pay scales.

Other features include on-screen labels for data fields that can differ from the computer name given that field. That allows more descriptive forms to be designed.

At each step in the creation or modification of a database, DataEase prompts the user to pick from among available choices listed in menu form. That is particularly useful when you want to define a relationship between fields in two different databases. The other database names and each of the fields within them are presented as menu items during the process. You don’t have to search your memory or hunt for old notes to get the job done. Experienced users, however, can bypass the prompting and accomplish their goals with a simple programming language. Even so, far less programming is needed (or possible) with DataEase than with the dBase or Rbase families of relational database programs.

Both programs automatically produce quick standard reports, and each also allows you to design custom reports. The custom report facility of DataEase is especially nice because it automatically generates a reasonably good format and then lets you modify it and see the result on the screen. By the time you print the report, it will be just what you want it to be.

Each program gives you access to other tasks. RapidFile includes a simple word processor so that you can create the letters or other documents to be merged with data lists.

DataEase allows you to create menus that give you access to other programs for word processing, spreadsheets or whatever, so that DataEase becomes the master environment in which you operate.

DataEase also is available in a local area network version for $700 for the first user and $900 for each additional group of three concurrent users. Information and dealer names are available from DataEase at (800) 243-5123.

For an extra $30, RapidFile is available from Ashton-Tate packaged on both 5-inch and 3 1/2-inch disks so that you can run one on your desktop computer and the other on your laptop or new IBM Personal System/2 model. Ashton-Tate can be reached at (213) 329-8000.

Keeping these characteristics in mind, a demonstration run at your software dealer should let you decide if either program meets your needs.