Database Maintenance Systems

Also: General Methods

James Newton says:

Interesting problem in language: We name things according to what they modify, so in your inventory list, you right "bearing" then a spacer (for a bearing) is "bearing spacer". And you might have "bearing spacer grease" or "bearing spacer grease applicator". And when you ask a programmer to write a search function to help you find all the "bearings" in inventory, every one of those will come back as "bearing", although only one of them is actually a bearing.

If you used the "x FOR y" format when naming things, you can search on what the entry STARTS with and win. "bearing", "spacer for bearing", "grease for bearing spacer", "applicator for bearing spacer grease". A query for "starts with 'bearing'" then only returns the actual bearings.

But just try to get humans to do anything logical. We still date shit with MM/DD/YY. And if you don't see why that's completely stupid, then congratulations, you are a human.

pssst.... I'm not really human... not fully anyway: I'm part programmer, and programmers can never write a program that works "right". eyeroll

See also:

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/xdb/ Xbase (formerly XDB) - Xbase compatible - Xbase (formerly known as xdb, also formerly known as xBase) is a collection of specifiations, programs, utilities and a C++ class library for manipulating Xbase type datafiles and indices.