Unibase by DMAC provided BC a great increase in speed when the new four multiprocessor, 384 MB RAM, ten gigabyte disk Tandem UNIX Box was installed. "Before installing Unibase by DMAC, one task took over 100 hours to perform. Now it takes just 17 hours. One function which took over 3 minutes is done in 3 seconds." says Michael Martin of BC.

We in development are very happy with this site for an additional reason -- NEW features for Unibase. Early on in the project the BC technical staff interface of Teresa Hansel, Mike Wolford, and Cindy Rabe and DMAC agreed that anything DMAC could change to improve the environment and make the conversion from the Nixdorf DCPA Targon smooth would be easier than writing new user instructions and teaching the 450 plus users of the system's 250 plus workstations.

Some of these features have been, are, or will be discussed elsewhere in the Unibase Technical Review. Listed here are some of the new features for which we all can thank BC. These features will hit all platforms with the Unibase by DMAC release 7.32i.

Get Next ... Using Speed Up

The greatest speed improvement came from removing the restriction of "get next ... using" in an index. As discussed in volume two of the current manual set on pg II-3-63 " If there is more than one record with the same key a 'get next ... using' will get the second (and third, etc.) record with the same key. This verb searches through the rest of the index if there is not another record with the same key and can take an incredible amount of time." Mike Wolford led the way to the spiffy new algorithm.

Unibase by DMAC has some new internal checks necessitated because it is running on four cpu's concurrently. Our thanks to Wanda Barron of ASI for testing this area so completely several years ago when we ran on our first RAID supported Pentiums. The changes were in unispool device handling.

Wait and Flush New Verbs Added

Two new verbs -- "wait" and "flush" now exist. The "wait" verb puts a particular process to sleep for a given number of seconds. The "flush" verb forces the operating system to disgorge all data sent to a file or stream at that instance.

A new type of output device -- "type" was created to allow a program to think it has up to 99 different printers running at the same time and still output data in the correct order to a printer, spool, or terminal emulator.

New environment variables allow processing zero length files in the Unibase by DMAC environment. These zero length files are handled correctly, passed over, and do not stop processing when they are allowed at all.

Termcap, Verbs, Others Improved

A new termcap for UNIX systems was developed which allows over 256 different new key combinations. ( If DOS could do it, why could not UNIX do it?).

The verb "define file" was improved to allow wild card file descriptions. Then the verbs "get next," "forward," and "back" were changed to allow easy processing of the wildcarded file definition.

Users can now define just what keys are valid in de and drun to clear an error message.

Unibase by DMAC on UNIX systems now performs smoothly running under PC Plus running under Windows 3.1. The idiosyncrasies of PC Plus running under Windows 3.1 have been

The fall issue of "The Review" will have more information about the ODBC Sybase access enhancements to the Unibase by DMAC ANSI Standard Structured Query Language to be utilized on the BC system.