Typical Applications of a Microcomputer Database Manager to Power System Problems

This paper reports on the application of a popular DBMS (database management system) to the solution of selected problems in Power Systems with the IBM Personal Computer in the context of the Power Engineering Curriculum at the University of Calgary. The problems selected are inductance and capacitance calculations of overhead transmission lines and per unit calculations for large power networks. These examples illustrate how to structure, organize, manipulate and query a database and also use it to service one or more independent application program modules to perform specific tasks without unnecessary data duplication. The power and flexibility of command file programming involving multiple database file access as well as program demodulation are also shown. The application programs developed in the paper amply demonstrate not only the benefits of the built-in query language, but also the ability of the DBMS to interface these programs with one or several database files. Because of these versatile features, microcomputer database management systems hold considerable promise as important, cost effective supplementary tools to conventional programming for power utilities as well.