Macon Systems, Inc.

About ADBM

Advanced DB Master is a database management product which combines ease of use with power and speed. This product was originally written for the Apple II in 1979 and was migrated to DOS platforms in 1983. After many successful years under DOS we are now shipping the 32 bit windows product for use with Windows 2000, or Windows XP, Vista 32 and 64 bit, Windows 7 32 and 64 bit. Go to the ADBM Downloads page for info on the demo version.

System Requirements: 256-512 megabytes ram.

For further information check the topics below.

Specifications - information about the Advanced DB Master ODBC driver.
Features - information about some powerful features for customizing your database with Advanced DB Master
Organization - information about the easy to use organization of Advanced DB Master
Information for users of the DOS product
Printing From DOS ADBM

Specifications

This version of Advanced DB Master is ODBC compatible. That means you can share information between databases created with Advanced DB Master and databases created with other ODBC compatible products like Microsoft Access. You can even attach tables from other products to your ADBM database. And Advanced DB Master's storage limitations are much more generous than most other popular database products, for example each record in a table can be up to 32 kilobytes in size. Take a look at the other specifications below:

Advanced DB Master 7 Database and Table Limits

250 tables in a Database
4,000 fields in a Table
10 fields in a Primary Key
10 fields in a Secondary Key
122 characters in Primary Key or Secondary Key
250 Secondary Key indexes
32,200 characters in a record
16,000 characters in a Fixed Character or Fixed Binary field
256,000 Gbyte of data in each Table
2,147,483,648 records per Table

Data Types Supported by Advanced DB Master 7 SQL Driver

Type	Storage	Ranges
Fixed Character	length+1	1 to 16000 ASCII characters
Boolean	1	0 or 1
Unsigned Byte	1	0 to 255
Signed Byte	1	-128 to 127
Unsigned Short	2	0 to 65,535
Signed Short	2	-32,768 to 32,767
Unsigned Long	4	0 to 4,294,967,295
Signed Long	4	-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647
Short Real	4	3.4E +/- 38 (7 digits)
Long Real	8	1.7E +/- 308 (15 digits)
Currency/BCD	length+1	1 to 30 decimal digits
Date	6	Year 0 to 9999
Time	6	Hour 0-23, minute 0-59, second 0-59
Datetime	16	Year 0 to 9999, hr,min,sec, fraction 0-8 digits
Fixed Binary	length+2	1 to 16000

Features

Advanced DB Master is packed with powerful features that make highly customizeable and and easily adaptable to specialized database needs. One good example is the image handling capability. Images can be stored internally in the database or externally as image files, and can be viewed and manipulated as part of a view or in a separate image editor window. Advanced DB Master also has built in features that help automate the process of including large amounts of images in a database. Here's a picture of an image as part of a view and also in the image editor window.

Advanced DB Master is a relational database management tool, and one feature which helps you capitalize on this is the view on a view. Any view can contain other views and the contained view can display any relational link between the two tables. For example in the view below the two files are linked on the invoice number.

Organization

Advanced DB Master for windows is even easier to navigate than the DOS version, because w've put a lot of effort into making the product easy and intuitive to use. Your main tool for organizing databases will be the Database Manager window. It provides a well organized display of all tables, views, macros and reports. From the Database Manager window you can add, delete, use or design all database components. Here's what it looks like:

This is just one example of how we've tried to pack in lots of functionality while keeping Advanced DB Master quick and easy to use. This product is full of Managers and Wizards which help you customize every aspect of your database. A good example is the View Creation Wizard whose 3 pages give you a good starting point for a new view:

We're sure that you'll love these features along with all the others we've included to make Advanced DB Master easy to use and navigate.

Information For DOS Users

Terminology Changes

For those of you already familiar with Advanced DB Master for DOS the information given here about the windows product might not make sense until you understand a couple of changes. Don't worry, not too much has changed, but we've had to update some terminology to fit with changes in the product and to keep up with the ever progressing data management industry. Hopefully this chart will make things clear.

Windows ADBM	DOS ADBM
Database	Relational File Set
Table	File
View	Screen Form
Macro	Keystroke Macro
Link	Link Format
Design Table	Restructure File
Design View	Edit Screen Form
Find	Selection Setup
Browse	Browse
DataChange Export	Data Exchange (output)
DataChange Import	Data Exchange (input)

Conversion

Elements Converted From DOS ADBM

The following elements of the DOS ADBM database files will be converted:

Data records
All field types supported by DOS ADBM
Computed fields
All relevant computed field functions, including alias references
Link formats for use by the computed fields
Relational file list
Dynamic Value tables (converted to separate tables)
Long Code tables (converted to separate tables)
Field help text (shows up on the status bar)
All fields form
Screen Forms
Arrays

Elements Not Converted

The following elements will not be converted. There is an equivalent and often better way of performing the same function.

Sets: Use the Browse on form and relational lookups.
Auto-Increment key: Use the Counter field type.
Macro Language: Use the new Visual Basic compatible macro language.
Reports: Use the new ADBM Report Writer.
Menus: Use a View defined as a control.
Accumulator: Use Sum(fieldname) in a query.
Screen format features added in Version 4.4 (boxes, lines, display computed fields)

Printing from DOS ADBM

The following steps are required to enable printing from DOS ADVANCED DB MASTER
under the XP operating system.

The printer must be the "DEFAULT" printer.
From the "Start" button, run "Printers and Faxes", then
set your printer to be the DEFAULT printer.

Copy the following three lines into a text file called
NETUSE.BAT, in any directory you like. You can use any
word processor or the windows programs NOTEPAD or WORDPAD.

NET USE LPT1: /DELETE
NET USE LPT1: \\JP32\hp5610 /persistent:yes
REM NET USE LPT1: \\COMPUTERNAME\PRINTERNAME /persistent:yes

Change the second line to correctly show
your own COMPUTERNAME (instead of JP32) and
the correct PRINTERNAME (instead of hp5610), then save the changes.

COMPUTERNAME is located by bringing up the "My Computer" properties
and selecting the "Computer Name" tab. Use the value given
for "Full Computer Name".

PRINTERNAME is located by clicking the "Start" button,
run "Printers and Faxes", then bring up properties for
your printer. Select the "Share" tab and use the "Share name".

Run this BAT file from a dos window. To bring up a dos
window: from the START button, choose the "RUN" button then type
in CMD and press OK. When the DOS window comes up, you will have
to change the directory to the directory that contains your
NETUSE.BAT file and then run this batch file.
After running the batch file, your dos window should display
the message:
"The command completed successfully"

Example dos commands to do this:
C:\
CD\mydir\xdir
NETUSE

These commands assume the NETUSE.BAT file is located in
directoryC:\mydir\xdir.

You should now be able to print from DOS ADBM.