askSam Systems' askSam 3.0 database lets you collect data from databases, email, Web sites, news feeds, and your own input, organize it in a way that makes sense to you, and perform searches, create reports, and add hypertext links.
My first surprise on opening the askSam box was to find only two disks inside. Having grown accustomed to setting aside tens of megabytes of disk space for a new software package, I was skeptical that askSam could offer much in the way of features in such a small space. The installation process went quickly and smoothly. In addition to askSam, it installs an uninstall icon and two application suites that use askSam: an office suite and an Internet suite. Both suites are collections of predefined, but customizable, files. The office suite includes an address book, to-do list, notepad, memo, fax, and letters files. The Internet suite includes an email database, home page archives, directory of Web sites, newsgroup database, HTML editor, and Internet tutorial. The professional version differs from the regular version in that it incorporates full-text indexing of your data -- incredibly useful for large collections of free-form text.
In askSam, a database is a collection of "documents" stored in a single file. Each document in a file can have up to 16,000 lines, and a file can be up to 4GB in size. Documents can be structured, as in a traditional database, or they can be free-form, containing arbitrary text. They can even be partially structured, like email or Usenet news files. And unlike a normal database, one document in a file need not look like the next -- for example, research for a paper or presentation could make up most of your file, followed by the actual text of your paper. Whatever form your data is in, askSam makes it easily accessible.
To create a new database in askSam, simply select File/New from the menu, or click on the Create New icon on the toolbar. If you will be importing data, your next step is to select File/Import or the Import icon on the toolbar. You can select one of a variety of sources, including plain text files, delimited or fixed-width text files, HTML, and dBASE, Word, and WordPerfect files. If you have multiple records in the same file and would like them to be stored as separate documents in your askSam file, you can have askSam divide your input at line boundaries, page boundaries, after every "n" lines, or at the occurrence of a particular string. The string delimiter is great for loading email or newsgroup files. askSam can also automatically identify fields in each record -- again especially useful for extracting headers from partially structured data like email and newsgroup files.
If you are entering all your own data and the data is at least partially structured, you will want to create an entry form for your file. To do this, select Edit/Entry Form from the menu bar. askSam presents you with a blank screen that you can fill with formatted text, graphics, OLE objects, and data-entry fields. Data-entry fields are indicated by a text name followed by a left square bracket ( [ ). If the field has a limited length, include a right square bracket ( ] ) where the field should end, whether on the same line or 10 lines down. Remember that it is easy to change field lengths as you're entering data, if you need to. Just hit Ctrl-E to change to editing mode, keep typing, and askSam will extend the length of the field as you type.
Free-form data is the easiest to set up: Simply start typing. When you want to go to a new document, save the current one (using Ctrl-S, the icon, or the File/
Save menu selection) and add a new one (using Ctrl-A, the icon, or Document/Add). In general, I've found that the keyboard shortcuts are intuitive enough that I prefer to use them and keep my hands on the keyboard.
Searching in askSam is one of the most flexible implementations I've seen. You can search through a single document, a single file, or multiple files. You can search individual fields, Boolean combinations of fields, or the full text of your documents. You can search using numeric comparisons or date ranges. With text fields, you can search for exact matches, fuzzy matches (such as Kathy = Cathy = Kathi), or proximity matches ("object" and "database" occur in the same sentence or paragraph, or within two sentences of each other). In the professional version you can set up full-text indexes on your files. These greatly increase the speed of full text searches and provide a sorted list of all the words in your file and how often they occur. Browsing through the word list can give you a good idea of the concepts that appear frequently in your data, and then you can double-click on the word to retrieve the documents that contain the word.
The same drill-down feature works in askSam's reports, too. Once you've run a report, double-clicking on a row in the report brings up the original document. You can then switch between the report and document views quickly using Ctrl-Tab. To create a report, select Tools/New Report from the menu bar, name your report, and then walk through the four steps in the report dialog box: select documents, sort them, lay out the report, and run the report.
Laying out the report format is straightforward. The editing tools are the same as for document editing, so all of the same font, color, image, and OLE features are available. You can add headers and footers to the report, as well as groups with subtotals. As in document editing, askSam provides menu and icon methods for creating your report, but it shows you the text codes it uses. Once you become familiar with these codes it is simple, and often faster, to type them instead of using the menu selections. If you're familiar with full-featured report-writing software, you'll find askSam's reports a bit lacking. The software has no graphing or mathematical functions (other than total), for instance. Still, given askSam's primary focus on textual information, this lack isn't surprising.
Finally, askSam's strengths in handling unstructured data with a large amount of text make it a natural fit for managing online data, including Web documents. Not only can you import, index, and search Web documents, you can also create and edit them within askSam. (See Figure 1, page 31.) Using the Format/
HTML menu selections, you can insert some basic HTML tags into your documents, or you can add your own hypertext links using Document/Set HyperText Link. And you can export any askSam document as an HTML document. (Note: askSam Systems has a beta version of Web Publisher available for free download off of its Web page. This product significantly expands on HTML authoring functionality.)
askSam is proof that software doesn't need to be big to be useful. A good design and a well-focused set of features make it easy to learn, easy to use, and efficient. It is everything you could want a database to be -- it takes advantage of any structure you might have, but it lets you be as flexible as you need to be when new information comes along, no matter how messy it may be.