Going to the Library will soon have an entirely different meaning for users of Hertford-based Nantucket UK’s Clipper, the microcomputer development environment and dBase compiler, which supports C, Assembler or Clipper languages. Library is the name given to a new add-on facility for Clipper, the first product to be released by Planet Software Ltd, of Holborn, London. The Library consists of a set of powerful functions and routines, designed to extend Clipper’s utilities and increase its efficiency. The Library’s functions include statistical, graphical, trigonometric, MS-DOS, financial, network and memory applications, but the most important of these is a set of 70 SQLBase Application Program Interface utilities, which enable the user to access data on Gupta Technology Inc’s SQLBase. Using the SQLBase single or multiuser engine, which is marketed in the UK by Henley Business Software, users can access data on any SQLBase-compatible product, such as IBM’s DB2 database management system. These may be located on a local micro, a SQLBase Server or mainframes running DB2. Planet Software believes Gupta Technology’s SQLBase to be the most efficient and reliable of the database languages on the market, and points out that it is the only one designed specifically to run on MS-DOS boxes. The company sees two main advantages in having the SQLBase functions: the time it takes to access data using SQL is short, and SQL is a more powerful language than Clipper code and so reduces the size of programs on disk. The Library also contains the original source code for its functions, enabling users to modify it to their own needs. Users writing in C will need C version 5.1 to modify the source code; in Assembler, ASM version 5.1 is needed. The Library functions with the summer 1987 release of Clipper and supports version 3.5.8 of SQLBase. It needs 640Kb of memory, which must be extended by 384Kb if the SQLBase functions are to be included. On the software front, it will support MS/DOS 3.0 and above. Planet Software expects The Library to evolve as Clipper does, and is already working on Version 2 of the product, which will have more networking and communications facilities. The current version is out now and costs UKP200 with the SQLBase Applications Program Interface.
