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!