COLD system solves data retrieval problems

The 100-plus acres of Hershey Park offer an amusement park, zoo, water rides, and a four star hotel. But the pile of accounting paperwork necessary to keep operations running smoothly threatened to become as high as one of the park´s roller coasters. In an enterprise employing close to 1000 full-time workers and bringing in over $50 million a year, managers at Hershey Entertainment and Resorts could not afford the time it took to track payroll records or human resources accounts. Installing a computer output to laser disk (COLD) system helped Hershey Entertainment and Resorts save 1000 hours per year. A COLD system´s basic advantage is the ability to archive print spool files from a host system in electronic format for fast retrieval. The Metafile COLD system creates a full-text index that specifies the location of each occurrence of a word. Searching the index is quicker than performing a full-text search for each query. The compressed index file also takes up less space. The Metafile system also provides the ability to index particular fields in advance. As a result, users can perform impromptu searches on any field in any document