Performance test: dBASE IV 1.1 vs. Fox Pro 1.02.

Tweak and fiddle. Those are the words that best describe this suite comparing dBASE IV 1.1 to FoxPro 1.02. The reason: both products work at their best under different conditions. FoxPro performs at its best doing "atomic" operations-single commands issued once or repeated many times. dBASE IV performs at its best on "composite" operations-a variety of commands put together to simulate a typical application. Our dilemma was to construct a single test suite that fairly portrays the strengths and weaknesses of both products.

To complicate matters, the memory configuration, environment variables, and BUFFERS and FILES settings all affect performance. For example, increasing BUFFERS in the CONFIG.SYS file or the DBHEAP environment setting speeds up some dBASE IV tests, but slows others. DBHEAP is a new environment variable that specifies the percentage of RAM used for overlays vs. application space. Two other environment variables, DBTMP and BAK, let you specify where dBASE IV stores temporary and backup files. FoxPro also lets you specify directories for temporary files for the text editor EDITWORK), for the SORT and INDEX commands (SORTWORK), and for the program cache (PROGWORK). For maximum speed, you can use a RAM disk for temporary storage. Thanks for the memory

Both dBASE IV 1.1 and FoxPro take advantage of the extra memory in your computer. dBASE …