The fixed field length is characteristic of most database programs and can be a real nuisance. It helps make the programs efficient, which is nice if you have sets of many thousands of data, but for limited data sets efficiency is not important.
About ten years ago I wrote my own database program which has no such restriction. It was however a primitive command-line type of program which was originally developed under Unix and modified to run under DOS, but I never wrote a Windows version. If anyone wants to tackle it I will be happy to send it out or put the source code on my website. It is written in pretty standard C. The data files are in simple ASCII text and a typical entry would look like this: %D 2007/07/07 %S Gorilla gorilla %L Antarctica %N Hey, this was a really interesting field trip, let me tell you about it .... (field of unlimited length) It has some pretty basic reporting facilities, and might be worth looking at if you have nothing better at hand. Omeone might like to compile it, hack it a bit to make it better, and distribute it. If you use Linux, it should be trivial, and as I recall the DOS version was pretty easy too. Bill Silvert ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Batcher" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU> Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2007 5:20 PM Subject: Database for field notes > Does anyone have suggestions for a database with which to keep field > notes. I use ACCESS, but the text field length is limited. I want to be > able to search notes by date, species, location, and other fields and > develop queries and reports as a result. Thanks in advance. >
