Asides from
the new look and feel of TCJ My-Stock DB, the biggest change in the program lies in
how the database is structured. In earlier version, there were many
databases, each of which held just one part type, such as, just tubes or just
capacitors. In this new version, there is one database, which holds all the
part types at once.
The advantage
that the many smaller databases held was that each database file was
physically smaller on the hard drive and each part type could be displayed
independently (no solid-state devices cluttering our vacuum tubes, or vice
versa). The advantage of the new larger database is that it allows all of
your electronic part collection to be cataloged and managed in one place, the
benefit of which becomes apparent when filtering the database to show only
those parts that needed for one of your projects, something that wasn’t
possible before, as all the parts needed for one project might have been held
in five different databases. Yet, the advantage displaying just one part
type, such as, resistors and only resistors, remains; all that is needed is
putting place a database filter to display only resistors. For example, in
the screen image below, we see the database with a filter that limits the
display to only those parts which are targeted for the line-amplifier
project.
The
disadvantage to the new database is the bigger file, but as 100-Gig hard
drives are common enough that even a 10-Meg file is not that big of a deal.
