DoyleSoft Newsletter
October 30th, 2006
Welcome to Volume 12! Happy Halloween!
- Brandon Doyle
DoyleSoft Download
This program is an easy to use but powerful font manager, which allows getting a quick overview of both installed and non installed fonts. It can install and uninstall fonts, and organize them in categories. Some of its features are:
Our review:
The interface is different than what you might expect. However AMP Font Viewer does have some powerful features. You can also display unicode characters for any font you choose. It will also display useful information such as the number of fonts installed.
We give it three out of five coffee cups.
DoyleSoft Download
This program is a small utility that allows you get the hexadecimal and RGB values of a color. It can stay resident in the system tray.
Our review:
This little utility works great and does exactly what it's designed to. The only thing it is missing is a color picker.
We give it four out of five coffee cups.
DoyleSoft Article
What are relational databases?
An important aspect of most every business is record keeping. The relational database was born in 1970 when E.F. Codd, a researcher at IBM, wrote a paper outlining the process. Since then, relational databases have grown in popularity to become the world standard.
Originally, databases were flat. Information was stored in one long text file, called a tab delimited file. Each entry in the tab delimited file is separated by a special character, such as a vertical bar (|) or a [TAB]. Each entry contains multiple pieces of information (fields) about a particular object or person grouped together as a record. A large text file makes it difficult to search for specific information or to create reports that include only certain fields from each record.
You have to search sequentially through the entire file to gather related information. A relational database allows you to easily find specific information. It also allows you to sort based on any field and generate reports that contain only certain fields from each record. Relational databases use tables to store information. The standard fields and records are represented as columns (fields) and rows (records) in a table.
In the relational database example, you can quickly compare information because of the arrangement of data in columns. The relational database model takes advantage of this uniformity to build completely new tables out of required information from existing tables. In other words, it uses the relationship of similar data to increase the speed and versatility of the database.
A typical relational database has anywhere from 10 to more than 1,000 tables. Each table contains a column or columns that other tables can key on to gather information from that table.
By storing this information in another table, the database can create a single small table with the locations that can then be used for a variety of purposes by other tables in the database. A typical large database, like the one on a big Web site, such as Amazon would have, will contain hundreds or thousands of tables like this all used together to quickly find the exact information needed at any given time.
Relational databases are created using a special programming language, structured query language (SQL), that is the standard for database interoperability. SQL is the foundation for all of the popular database applications available today, from Access to Oracle.
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