UR for $19

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 9, 2007 at 12:52 PM

Hi Jim,

jimspoon wrote:
>Ideally I’d like to see support for
>databases with multiple tables referencing each other - allowing for many-to-one
>data relationships etc. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that in a PIM program.

IMHO, your best bet in this direction is SQL Notes, which I am currently assessing. It has been discussed in this forum with its developer. It’s very flexible, providing access to its SQL infrastructure from external programs, but also offering an interesting interface apparently influenced by Ecco Pro. I’ve never been an avid Ecco user myself so I can’t really tell.

>Even with attributes, many PIMs seem to be
>functionally similar to a flat-file database.

That is not stricty true. I think infrastructure-wise, there are two popular approaches:

(a) Some kind of serial file format, ranging from evolved TXT/RTF to XML. This is often found in one or two pane outliners, though it’s becoming more and more rare. Examples include Brainstorm, Treepad (at least the Lite version), Freemind, the now dyfunct Hyperclip etc. In such cases, the hierarchical relationship of the PIM information items is more or less embedded in the file structure.

(b) A relational database, to which the main program acts as an interface. This is the case in a very broad spectrum of products, ranging from Outlook to UltraRecall and from Clipmate to on-line CMS software such as WordPress.

The ‘problem’ in the second case is that the tables in the database are more or less fixed as are the relationships among them. For a programmer that might be a limitation, but for most users it’s not. Personally, I wouldn’t want to fiddle with Outlook’s object model! (see http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?ID=37 ).

Cheers
alx