ENFORM User's Guide

1 Introduction
058058 Tandem Computers Incorporated 1–1
ENFORM, a product that is part of the ENCOMPASS Distributed Data Base
Management System, enables you to simply and efficiently:
Retrieve data from a data base.
Perform calculations (such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division)
upon the retrieved data.
Sort and group the retrieved data.
Perform cumulative operations (such as counting, totaling, and averaging) upon
the retrieved data.
Format and print a report containing the retrieved data.
Create a new physical file containing the retrieved data.
The ENFORM language consists of statements, clauses, and commands that you use to
provide ENFORM with a detailed description (called a query specification) of: the data
to be retrieved from the data base, the operations to be performed on that data, and the
form in which the data is to be returned to you.
This guide discusses the use of ENFORM language elements but does not discuss the
syntax that you use to specify these elements. To obtain a brief summary of the syntax
enter the ENFORM ?HELP command or refer to Appendix A. For detailed syntax
information, refer to the ENFORM Reference Manual.
Using ENFORM—
Overview
Before ENFORM can retrieve any data, you must perform tasks that provide ENFORM
with the environment and information it needs to retrieve the data. Figure 1-1 shows
these tasks.