Research on Carrier, a dialectally diverse Athabaskan language of the central interior of British Columbia, has resulted in a fairly large amount of information stored on-line The databases in which this material is kept are used both for research and to generate printed dictionaries. The database system is home-brew, developed incrementally over a decade, primarily using UNIX tools. A similar system, though different in detail, underlies the Montana Salish (Flathead) dictionary. This paper describes this system and explore its virtues and vices.