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Created by Mark McDonough and Lois Rodden Note: The following is the full text of my review of AstroDatabank version 2.0 from The Mountain Astrologer Imagine having at your fingertips the largest accurate collection of famous people's birth data. AstroDatabank 2.0 contains birth data carefully collected by Lois Rodden for many years, over 20,000 records, 10,000 of which have been updated with corrections, longer biographies, and more categories (for research). Ninety percent of Marion March's data files and the entire Courtney Conrad sports collection have been added to this version, too. The new version supports many foreign languages including Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, Gaelic, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Portugese, Spanish, and Swedish. This means that anyone can input people's names, notes, and biographies in any of these languages. The software is designed to allow you to export charts to other programs, including Solar Fire 4 and 5, Win*Star 1 + 2, AstrolDeluxe 3.3 and later, AstrolDeluxe Report Writer 4.0 and later, Nova (birth data only), AAF (European and Goravani), ASCII, Astrocalc, AstroWin, QuickCharts, janus, shri jyoti star, and new Kepler 4.6. You can also import chart data from Solar Fire, Win*Star, and Nova. Combining the import and export features enables you to convert almost any program's files to another's format. In the earlier version, you were limited in how many of the built-in charts you could export to other programs. In this version, you can export as many charts as you want. AstroDatabank is designed to do much more than just view the charts of famous people and events. In fact, it does so many things, that it's almost impossible to cover them all in a single article. Most obviously, it allows you to search all of the records for charts that fall into specific categories (see below) as well as search records for single and multiple astrological factors, e.g. Mars in Cancer and Jupiter in detriment. But AstroDatabank can also sort the listing by any planet's longitude, starting at zero Aries and ending with 30 degrees of Pisces. You can even ask it to sort first by one planet, and then by a second and even third, so that you could see first people who have Sun and Moon and Mercury in Aries, then people who have Sun and Moon in Aries but Mercury in Taurus, etc. You can also add your own records to the database. You can add each person's name, address, contact information – like when you last saw them, notes and biographical information, include them in any of the vast number of categories (see below) and even print mailing labels for those who have an upcoming Solar Return! Even in viewing the lists, you have complete control over what information you see in each column. You can create up to four of your own layouts or use the ones that come with the software. One layout emphasizes the biographical information, another how accurate the data is, and a third shows you the position of each planet (by sign, degree, house, and Nakshatra) for each person, all on one line. The records are coded with over 660 personal characteristics, 125 events, and 45 types of relationships. There are currently over 60,000 categories attached to these 20,000+ records. The personal characteristics include: different medical or psychological conditions; physical, mental, or personality traits (e.g. courageous, acquisitive, etc.); a wide variety of family patterns (including number of children, abusive environment, divorced, etc.); different lifestyles (e.g. many moves, inheritance, self-employed); sexual variances, criminal behavior and consequences, circumstances around the birth, a huge range of vocations, notable achievements and awards, and mundane occurrences (like disasters, wars, historic milestones). The categories of events include crime (e.g. arrest), death, family (such as adopted by parent), financial, health, mental health (e.g. psychotic episode), relationship (like marriage), social, work (e.g. retired), and miscellaneous (including mystical experience, changed name, trauma from nature). Relationships include perpetrators of crimes, business associates, lovers, sibling, spouse, devotee, boss, guru, victims, etc. It is important to understand that AstroDatabank also includes bibliographies for each individual, with important information on each person's life. Although you can work with all 20,000+ records at one time, to do so requires either a lot of patience and/or a very fast PC or preferably both, as searching and even displaying this many records places real demands upon your computer. Even just the storage required is considerable. You'll need about 500 megabytes to store the database in Vedic format. It is better to "filter", as the program calls it, the records for just the charts that you want to study. You can have the program display, for example, only the accurately timed data – e.g. with a Rodden Rating of B or better – or only famous peoples (or events) charts. You can show people (or events) from any of the above-mentioned categories, relationships, or events. Or you can limit what is displayed by choosing any single or multiple astrological factors including planetary positions by sign, house, Nakshatra, dignity, stationary/retrograde/direct, rulership, as well as in aspect to any other point. You can find any record by name. As you view an individual's record, you can open a second window with all of the program's information on that person, or another information window with the planet positions, sorted aspect list, and biography, or view their chart. AstroDatabank's piece de resistance is its creation of AstroSignatures. At first glance, all these are are a sophisticated weighting scheme, where you can create a set of planetary factors, each with its own weighting, to analyze your records for. To create a Saturnian personality signature, for example, you might give 4 points to Saturn conjunct the Ascendant, 2 points for Saturn in Capricorn or Aquarius, 1 point for Saturn in an angle to the Sun or Moon, 0.5 points for each planet in the 10th house, and -1 points for Saturn in the 12th house. Then you can see the entire listing sorted by who scored highest to lowest in Saturn points. Mark McDonough has also shared with me the following Details on AstroDatabank 2.0: Records: Over 23,000 records. Over 15,000 with Rodden rating B and above. Click here to see the list of famous people in the AstroDatabank. Characteristics: Over 88,000 characteristics records using 690 characteristic codes. Click here to see the characteristics we use. Events: Over 27,000 events listed in 125 event types. Click here to see the event types we track. Relationships: Over 5,000 relationships listed in 45 relationship types. Click here to see the relationship types we track. Points Calculated (longitude, declination and speed): Planets, Planet despositors, house rulers, house cusps, Chiron, Vesta, Pallas, Juno, Ceres, Part of Fortune, Vertex. House Systems: Koch, Placidus, Equal, Whole Sign, Regiomontanus, Campanus, Porphyry, Alcabitus. Aspects: Conjunction, Semisextile, Semisquare, Sextile, Square, Trine, Sesquiquadrate, Quinqunx, Opposition, Parallel, Contra-Parallel, Quintile, Bi-quintile, Septile, Bi-septile, Tri-septile. Dignities: Ruler 1, Ruler 2. Detriment, Exaltation, Fall, Accidental. Vedic Calculations: 21 Ayanamsas plus custom; Whole Sign houses; House and Planet Rulers; Vedic Aspects; Nakshatras; Benefit/Malefic planets; Benefic/Malefic houses; Kendra, Trikona, Upachya, Dusthana, Maraka, etc.; Own sign, exaltation; Friendly/Enemy sign; etc. SoftStar News is published online every other month with the latest software reviews, previews, tips, and bug warnings. You can see the list of issues by clicking here. 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