DBASE JOIN CAUTION
by Matt Gormley, SNO-KING KUG, August 1987

(Discovery of a real bug in the dBase II JOIN command)

In doing a test routine for the article in this issue about
transferring records from Perfect Filer to dBaseII, a strange
finding was made.  It involves the use of the command JOIN, which
Ashton-Tate says "is one of the most powerful commands of
dBase!!"

JOIN actually is a fairly straight forward command procedure and
all of the books lay out the protocol for its use, and make it
look easy.  I have dBaseII version 2.41, including a later update
disk that Ashton-Tate sent for free, still version 2.41 though. 
Try as I would, the easy routine for JOINing two files had me up
a tree.  It worked, but, it worked not in the manner it had been
told to JOIN.

I was joining two files of four fields each, a really simple
test, and the darn thing gave me four, five, six, seven and eight
fields in as many tests of the same command procedure.  It was
totally unpredictable!  Only when I used the long routine,
actually spelling out all the field names wanted in the JOINed
file, would the command do what it was supposed to do.  I could
see a problem if one had two files to JOIN, each having fifteen
or sixteen fields.  The command line, with every one of the
fields typed out, would probably extend well past the 254
character limit of dBaseII!!

After hours of probing, re-running, comparing and reading, I gave
up and called Ashton-Tate Tech support.  The fellow that returned
my call, a John Thomas, was interested in the problem and after
it was described to him he asked me to hold on for a minute while
he looked up his references.  He returned fairly quickly and had
a relieving comment to offer "..JOIN in version 2.41 is a little
flaky...".  In a way it was pleasant to find out that the problem
was not one of hardware concern but later, in retrospect, I was a
little miffed that Ashton-Tate didn't at last offer a quick fix
for lousy tricks!  Version 2.43 does have some problems.  So,
user beware of even the highest and mightiest of them all.  They
may just jump up and bite you when you least expect it!
