It was only a matter of time before two competing daily newspapers would request the same database at the same time.

Such was the case with two Ohio newspapers. The Dayton Daily News and the Akron Beacon-Journal both requested state drivers records from the Ohio Department of Motor Vehicles not knowing of the others request. Supplying the DMV with about 70 nine-track magnetic tapes, the Daily News received the database in November 1990 with intentions of finding repeat offenders of the D.U.I. law.

But the Daily News did not start analyzing the data until June of 1991, according to reporter John Erickson. "This was such a huge database, we put it on the mainframe," he said.

In fact, the data included every person who was ever an Ohio driver. "There were about 60 million records on the tapes, including drivers who were dead," Erickson said. The problem was much bigger than that. The records were divided into two separate databases one with the key field, names, addresses and so forth, and the other with all the conviction information. This meant that it could possibly take days to run a simple join.

Then reporters found that the DMV didn't send them all the documentation for the tapes. They scrambled until they located a "lower-echelon" computer technician who helped unscramble the problem.

To add to the growing list of difficulties, they had to use a "primitive" software program called Quick Start, forcing technicians to write a different program for every task. "They wrote a sorting program and gave us the results on paper," Erickson said. Not being able to use a personal computer was another disadvantage, according to Erickson. "It's a lot easier to work on a PC," he said. "You have much more control over the data. When you're on the mainframe you pass along what you want, but you can't play with it."

"It's like being at a press conference and not being able to ask questions," he added. While the Daily News was plodding ahead in their data analysis, the Beacon-Journal was hard at work analyzing the same database. The difference was that the Beacon Journal used a PC to analyze its data. But problems still arose.

"At the time we had a 1600 BPI tape drive and the tapes were 6250," said Bob Paynter of the Beacon-Journal. "We wrote a program on the mainframe allowing the drive to read the data. Then we loaded it into the PC."

Paynter explained that he used the mainframe to "pare down" the data pulling out only the records they needed. "We ended up with about 5 million records," he said.

Mainframe technicians then copied the records on to a nine-track tape at 1600 bpi. Paynter then imported the records into his PC.

"If I would have had a 6250 bpi tape drive at the time, I would have done it all on a PC," Paynter said. "Then the only time consuming problem would have been loading the data from 70 tapes."

Once past the drive problems, Paynter experienced others. "Every time I used XDB I had trouble," he said. "I had import problems, export problems. I literally spent weeks dealing with the XDB people on the phone."

When Paynter began crunching numbers, XDB presented more problems. "I would run it (query) through once and get one result, and get another result the next time," he explained. "I just didn't trust it."

With the frustration level rising, Paynter decided to use another data analysis program called Paradox. The end result was rewarding, he said.

"It's worked great," Paynter said. "But the XDB problems could have been something I was doing. I just don't know."

By September 1991 the Paynter had the results in hand and was able to publish a story about police officers and snowplow drivers with poor driving records.

The story surprised the Daily News.

"We thought we were the only ones who had it (the database) and I think we got a little too comfortable," said Steve Sidlo of the Daily News. "All of a sudden the Beacon-Journal runs some pretty good stories, but it wasn't what we were working on. It became quite clear that the Beacon-Journal had the same database as the Daily News," Sidlo said. So the Daily News began pushing harder to finish the story on DUI repeat offenders. It yielded the story in November 1991.

In December, the Beacon-Journal ran its story on DUI repeat offenders. Too close for comfort for the Daily News, according to Sidlo. He said the Daily News might have waited another two weeks to run the story if it had not known about its cross-state rival. And both papers continue to use the drivers license database regularly. They have broken the data down to make a sub-database that includes only drivers in the circulation area of the respective paper. When a story breaks, they have quick access to information about drivers in their region.