Standard compositional search databases

[John Donovan]

For many years Probe Software has provided compositional databases for various purposes, including compositional matching with our CalcZAF/Standard software distribution:

https://www.probesoftware.com/resources/

These compositional databases include the following:
DHZ.MDB                        ' DHZ composition database (for matching and searching)
SRM.MDB                        ' NIST SRM composition database (for matching and searching)
ORE.MDB                        ' Ore compositions from Dana's Mineralogy
DANA.MDB                      ' Oxide and silicate compositions from Dana's Mineralogy
AMCSD.MDB                      ' American Mineralogist composition database (for matching and searching)

In addition to the default standard database which is a copy of the Standard_UofO.mdb composition database. Also included are ASCII (text) file versions of these databases that can be utilized for various purposes.

Recently one of our colleagues mentioned that one of these ASCII files would not import into a new standard database, and we realized that although we had been updating our various standard databases (MDB files), we had not always updated the corresponding ASCII (text) (.DAT files).

Therefore, the latest CalcZAF and Probe for EPMA update (v. 14.0.2) does now include these updated databases for those that want to perform specialized applications of their own. Though one could always create a new ASCII export file for these compositional databases, by using one of the Export menus in Standard.

Note also that there are two ASCII import/export formats. One where each standard contains several lines of ASCII text (Standard.DAT) and another format where each standard is on a single line of text containing 100 elements (Standard2.dat).

Please note that these ASCII (text) compositional (.DAT) files do not include all data that can be optionally saved to the MDB file databases. For example, the .DAT files do not include EDS and CL spectra, and also do not include the large (up to 64K) "memo" text fields. The distributed compositional databases above do not contain these additional data fields, but if you have utilized these fields in your own compositional databases from our Standard application, one could access these database fields for import/export from the Microsoft Access application if necessary.