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.