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Document	V2I8A7
Title	A Review of BONDtrv by Bruce S. Gray
Keywords	BONDTRV
Text	Introduction "BONDtrv is an AREV Bond to the Novell Btrieve filing system" That's one short sentence that puts Arev into the big league and for many could be more important than SQL For those who don't know Btrieve is Novell's proprietary Client Server filing system It's used by many custom applications and has DIRECT programming interfaces for COBOL C most of the BASICs and PASCAL Btrieve ALSO has it's own BTREE indexing system We'll be reviewing Icicle Software's BONDtrv Version 1 0 Icicle Software's Pat McNertheney (of BOND123 fame) has done his usual superb job in bringing this bond to fruition Once installed you can use all of AREV's features including multi values on existing Btrieve files create new Btrieve files FROM within AREV and use Btrieve's EXTREMELY fast indexing system In order to INSTALL BONDtrv you must have AREV 2 0 or higher and Btrieve 5 0 single user VAP or NLM Conclusions At $495 00 it's somewhat high priced but for those who need to bond to that custom banking or accounting application it's worth three times the price Packaging The product comes in the all too familiar cardboard sleeve it is however tastefully decorated Inside one finds the bond disk manual and warrantee card WITH the product only available DIRECT FROM Icicle Software is a warrantee card really needed? Documentation For those used to AREV's variable length records the struggle of dealing with Btrieve's fixed length records becomes a burden The manual does a good job of leading you through these pitfalls BONDtrv comes WITH it's own tutorial and it is a MUST to read The biggest problem you'll have is with Btrieve's fixed length records and indexing system It might be helpful to have Novell's Btrieve Manual handy Installation The INSTALLATION routine was straightforward and is started WITH the standard AREV 2 x INSTALL routine used for all upgrades AFTER being queried if I wanted to INSTALL the tutorial (Yes Yes Yes) the bond installed with no further user input Tutorial The tutorial (a Real Estate Database) comes WITH its own dummy data files and is used to teach each of the many many features of the bond I know real programmers don't read the docs but all I can say is "You'd better read these" One of the many features of BONDtrv is the ability to define a Btrieve file two DIFFERENT ways The first is to define the entire file USING the length of the btrieve field to calculate the field offsets (actually the bond does this for you) The other way is to enter the offset and field length for only those fields wanted This allows you to create DIFFERENT 'views' into the same file and is EXTREMELY fast for long records The bond doesn't have to start FROM the beginning of the record each time it wants to locate a field Another wow!! is the fast Btrieve INDEXES Yes (say it quietly now) AREV is slow When you see the speed of the Btrieve index hit returns maybe we'll all start asking RTI for improvements OH WELL!! BONDtrv will create and update native Btrieve INDEXES It will ALSO create and maintain AREV indexes on the same file And for you network types out there record locking protocol is handled for both the AREV and Btrieve side Down Side Try as I might I just can't fault this product Well maybe the documentation could cover a bit more native btrieve subject matter But I couldn't get the darn thing to hiccup WITH all the help (F1) SCREENS all the option (F2) SCREENS it's hard to see how a novice user can go wrong With portable NETWARE picking up steam and being ported to everywhere this timely product will create more opportunities for us all Mr Gray is an independent Advanced Revelation consultant working for Gray & Associates of 790 Long Hill Road Middletown CT 06457 (Volume 2 Issue 8 PAGE 6)

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Page last modified: 08/02/03