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Archiver > TMG > 1999-10 > 0938813575


From: Alice Eichholz <>
Subject: TMG-L: Two people working on same database
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 17:32:55 -0400 (EDT)


Has anyone had experience in having more than one person working
on the same database and making additions, corrections, etc?

Here is the problem. I wrote a family genealogy in 1982 which needs
considerable updating. One family member volunteered and entered all the
data from the book into a TMG dataset. I started out working on the earliest
generations in a separate dataset while another family member who is also
a TMG user volunteered to put in the more recent generations updated
information into the main dataset which has the book information in it.

We wanted to add my work and replace that information with the old dataset
information. We each have a copy of the original dataset and I had the
copy of the revised set (207 people out of 12,000 so far). But when we
went to combine my additions into his it today we ran into a number of
problems -- after several starts and stops we figured out how to do it.

The problem mostely came from the fact that even though I had created FLAG
for the people I was importing, the flag values were dropped when we
started merging for duplicates. So, I couldn't easily identify the few
duplicates in my dataset from the many in the original dataset. To solve
this I printed out a list of people report from my revised set with the
FLAG still set and compared it with the PickList in the original set.
Since there were only 207 people I was importing to 12,000, this worked
fairly well, but you can imagine that the search for duplicates to replace
the revisions with the old information would have been REALLY
timeconsuming (there are a lot of people with the same names without data
yet in the 12,000 person set from the book) had I just let the search for
duplicates continue!

We realized that it would be GREAT if there was a way to have the TMG
resident on a server so that we both had locked access. Then the two or
us (or a third if we find a volunteer) coul dmake the changes without
havijng to create a new data set, merge with the old, and tediously check
for duplicats. Does anyone know if this is possible. It seems to me that
collaborative work would be a great opportunity for others besides us as
well.

Any thoughts?
Alice Eichholz





Alice Eichholz, Ph. D., C.G.
Professor of Liberal Studies
Vermont College of Norwich University
Montpelier, VT 05602

phone: 802-828-8825
fax: 802-828-8814

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