5. The field can insist that whatever you type in is identical two times in a row or it won’t save the data record—useful if you deal with complex numbers that have to be right.
6. The field can be required—something that you have to enter, or InfoStar won’t let you go on.
Oh, and these are only examples! I guess I’m just a simple country girl, but I was amazed and thrilled by all that InfoStar could do with its data fields.
◻ How big are your data fields allowed to be? How many fields are you allowed to have? InfoStar allows you a maximum of 245 fields per record, and a maximum of 255 characters per field—it comes out to a maximum of 62,475 characters per data record. (Perfect Filer, again by way of comparison, theoretically allows 70 fields with a combined total of 1,024 characters. On the other hand, the one time I tried to test this limit with Perfect Filer, the program went comatose on me.) I do wonder whether an InfoStar data record that was 61K in size might mean you would get fewer than 64K data records into your data base. On the other hand, who could imagine a 61K data record on a personal computer? It is, after all, about the same size as a 60-page letter to your Aunt Millie, and how often do you write 60-page letters to your Aunt Millie?
◻ Once you have data in your data base, the sort keys determine how you can get the data out again. Do you want to get the information out in alphabetical order by name? Numerical order by ZIP code or phone number? Some combination of the two? (For example, you might, if the information is in your data records, want to sort your friends by who is left-handed, who gave you a Christmas card last year, when their birthdays are, or all of the above.) How many sort keys will the data base allow? What kinds? How long does it take the program to do a sort?
To take a primitive example, Perfect Filer allows you up to five sort keys (alphabetical order by sister’s name, for example; numerical order by ZIP code; both; numeric order by phone number; all three; and so on). Perfect Filer will also generate up to twenty subsets from which to sort. (Left-handed Republicans, female plumbers, all those who owe you more than three dollars—you name it.) And it will also let you have up to 40 list format fields—that is, it will allow you to generate up to 40 different kinds of list (all left-handed female plumbers who live on the West Coast). InfoStar, on the other hand, will allow you 32 sort fields, which is a few more than 5; but it doesn’t have any subsets per se and doesn’t seem to allow you more than one list format. On the other hand, the range of “logical expressions” it allows is amazing, and provided you understand BASIC (InfoStar’s data are written in CBASIC) fairly well, you can attain heights of efficiency Perfect Filer couldn’t even dream of (more on this immediately).
◻ What kinds of calculations will your program do, and when does it do them? Some programs will allow you to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and other even more abstruse calculations, and all at the data entry stage. The best of these allow serial calculations. For example, take A and multiply it by B; then divide the result by C; then add it to D. A program known as DB Master allows calculations for only two fields at a time: A plus B equals C. D plus E equals F. C plus F equals G. Other programs will only allow you to specify that certain relations between data exist, and then only at the report-generating stage. Perfect Filer, for example, will allow you to specify that you only want your report to contain the people whose ZIP codes are between 20815 and 21903—but it won’t do any arithmetic at all. InfoStar, on the other hand, can do algebraic and numeric calculations and impose such logical conditions as “include this record if it meets X criterion”; “do this calculation unless the data field is Y”; “do this if conditions X and Y OR conditions P or Q exist.” Zowie!
◻ What sort of “overhead” does the program demand? That is, what do you need to be stored on your diskette in addition to your data records? One trade-off might be that the more sort keys, subsets, list formats, and/or logical expressions you have, the less space you have for your data records. Unlike Perfect Filer, InfoStar creates an index file for every data file that you create. An InfoStar index file contains only the field values of your sort key(s) and addresses for each of your data records, but even so, with a lot of sort keys and with a nice, big data base, the index file is not going to be tiny.
Playing with InfoStar—after a week hunched over the keyboard, I still can’t say I’ve learned it—was, in order, daunting, boring, thrilling, mystifying, frustrating, and annoying. The program comes with four (count em, four) diskettes and three instructional tomes of a size and heaviness guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of a neophyte. We’re talking half again as big as the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. We’re talking three three-ring binders crammed to capacity with information. Daunting.
The program comes complete with three on-line tutorials—one introductory tutorial that assumes that the person using it has never been near a computer before, one tutorial for data entry, and one tutorial for generating “quick reports.” All three are pretty to look at, slow as molasses to try to go through, and simpleminded in the extreme. The first one, for example, draws you a picture of a computer terminal on its screen just in case you’re suffering from selective blindness and can’t see the terminal you’re running the program on. My advice to those who buy InfoStar and who’ve ever even seen a computer before is not to bother with the tutorials—certainly not with the first one!—but to go straight to the training manual and start plowing your way through. It shouldn’t take more than a hundred years.