The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : dBASE for Windows Slow but Compatible

When Borland International bought Ashton-Tate Corp. for $439 million back in 1991, it was, for all intents and purposes, buying the rights to a single software product: dBASE, which dominated the personal computer database market.

Three years later, after posting tens of millions of dollars in losses and watching Microsoft Corp. take a big piece of the PC database business, Borland has finally released the Windows version of dBASE.

First, the bad news: It’s slow, substantially slower than either of its Microsoft competitors, FoxPro 2.6 for Windows or Access 2.0.

Now the good news: dBASE 5.0 for Windows boasts unmatched compatibility with millions of existing dBASE applications and features superb tools for developing new applications. Database novices will find the new program far easier to use than any previous version of dBASE or, for that matter, the new DOS version of dBASE, also numbered 5.0. And simpler databases won’t suffer noticeable performance problems.

This is happy news both for Borland, which desperately needs a hit product, and for thousands of businesses that have built databases using earlier versions of dBASE. Some dBASE loyalists feared Borland’s goal might be to subtly shift customers to its other database product, Paradox. But even though dBASE 5.0 for Windows shares Borland’s underlying data access engine with Paradox, this definitely is not Paradox by another name.

The dBASE data file structure is the most popular in the world, creating a standard by which data is exchanged among virtually every kind of PC Windows and DOS program that manipulates data--everything from simple address lists to complex geographic information system mapping programs. And there are probably millions of special-purpose applications written in the dBASE programming language.

Existing custom applications from dBASE IV and dBASE III Plus will run without modification inside dBASE 5.0 for Windows. There are also tools to convert them into true dBASE 5.0 for Windows applications that can take full advantage of the graphics user interface of Windows. (Custom applications are those that have been written by database developers to perform special data tasks, such as tracking a company’s inventory or managing its personnel data.)

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At the other end of the data management spectrum, where large companies keep large databases on special-purpose computers called servers, dBASE 5.0 for Windows is equipped to access that data from desktop PCs, called clients.

Data on servers is typically stored in large, complex database programs from companies such as Oracle and Sybase, and PCs can gain access to it through so-called SQL (structured query language) commands. dBASE 5.0 for Windows--unlike its Microsoft competitors--allows simultaneous use of different brands of SQL databases as well as native dBASE files.

It also automatically translates dBASE commands into the appropriate SQL dialect, so you don’t need to learn SQL, though you can still send SQL commands directly if you’d prefer.

Those are features of interest to experienced dBASE developers, but the $495 program has plenty to offer novice database users as well. I particularly liked the Form Designer and Form Expert, which combine to automate the creation of forms. They make good use of the color and typographical strengths of Windows.

An important feature of dBASE for Windows is the Visual Query Designer, which is used to create the basic database instruction, or query. Visual Query Designer, which displays field names horizontally across (and off) the screen, is a direct descendant of DOS dBASE query “skeletons” and Paradox’s query design method.

It works OK, but it takes more keyboard or mouse activity to use than the query design methods in Microsoft’s FoxPro for Windows and Access 2.0.

A bigger problem for dBASE for Windows is speed, or the lack thereof. People have to sit idle while a database program is looking up data for them, so a slow program can be a real bear.

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Unfortunately, I found dBASE 5.0 for Windows to be generally much slower than the latest versions of FoxPro and Access, both in creating and searching indexes and in searching complete data fields.

A common task would be selecting a list of names of customers who bought a particular product and sorting the list by ZIP code for a mailing. On a 66-megahertz 486 PC, it took dBASE 5.0 for Windows 4.2 seconds merely to find 124 indexed names from a list of about 107,000. When I instructed it to also sort their ZIP codes, which were also indexed, the task stretched to 9.7 seconds. By comparison, FoxPro could list the names in under a second and do it with ZIP codes sorted in 2.2 seconds. Access took 2.1 and 2.8 seconds, respectively.

The worst performance comes if you try to retrieve and sort data from fields that are not indexed, which is impossibly slow. A task that retrieved only two records of the 107,000 and sorted those records took 37 seconds in Access and FoxPro but an agonizing 7 minutes, 15 seconds in dBASE 5.0 for Windows. One reason was that dBASE insisted on sorting the entire table of 107,000 records first rather than retrieving the selected items and then doing the sort.

But dBASE 5.0 for Windows has the best programming tools for creating database applications, and it makes them easy to use. Everything you do in using the various designer shortcuts or interactive tutorials results in dBASE programming code being written in a “command” window in the program. That code can then be modified, and you can see the results in the form or query or report you’ve just designed. It is an excellent way to learn how to program in the dBASE language.

dBASE is a fully “object oriented” language, which is the state of the art in programming. dBASE 5.0 for Windows does an excellent job of organizing the large array of object properties--a feature of such a language--by using a simplified presentation called the object inspector.

dBASE 5.0 for Windows will undoubtedly extend the life of dBASE as a database standard and win back some developers who defected to other programs. But it will probably have them clamoring for more speed.