Re: Oracle versus Sqlserver

Joel Garry doodled thusly:

>> First, Oracle was NOT a commercial product in 1977. more like
>> 1979/80.
>
>Correct, see history in Nov/Dec Oracle magazine.

How timely! I've given up trying to get hold of it. Have subscribed to the mag about ten(10) times through the Net: hasn't

shown up once yet... That site must be handled by SQL Server!

>
>Tom Price: I remember when we went to Pratt & Whitney the first time,
>we showed them all the system mods that they needed to put on their VM
>systems so that they could run it, and they already had system mods on
>all those same lines - local mods. It was a real mess.

Hehehe! My boss back then wanted us to run SQL/DS on DOS/VSE with 600Kb main memory and an Assembler and RPG program base, slowly being converted to Cobol! Thank God my opinion prevailed.

Cripes, what a site! I had to battle all the way to resignation before they replaced the punched cards with the 34xx magnetic diskette coder/readers. They wanted us to re-punch nearly 300 programs! Took less than a month once we got the diskettes running. Of course, the boss took the credit for the "innovation" and "increase in productivity". Who said Dilbert is new?

>
>Some of the early Oracle installations were pretty bad too. But it
>can (and has been) be argued that Oracle took the lead early.

Exactly. Oracle with V4 in 1983/1984 was one of the few RDBMS available that could actually automatically recover to a consistent state after an OS crash. Ingres with its "advanced code" never did: it always needed manual intervention with that blessed "recoverdb" command...

>
>I was first paid to work on a R database in 1981. I first saw Oracle
>in '83. It seemed pretty good, but not as good as what I had worked
>on. Later it came out that a lot of those V3 Oracle dbs were pretty
>bogus...

Hey! Mine at Prime did work fine! :-)

>would work as fast relationally as the old hierarchical dbs. So
>whether he was right or wrong in theory, I'd say he was wrong in fact
>- that is, the commercial environment hasn't let his theories be
>properly developed.

Quite true. Fabian Pascal has always had a bone about precisely this. Still remember the reaction to some of his statements in Compuserve, back in 1990/91. Got himself expelled from most RDBMS fora. Pretty ridiculous, when the guy was one of the most ardent defenders of the relational DB model!

> Now we have objects, whatever that is.

Join the club. One day someone will have to explain to me in English exactly _what_ have we gained from all that bloatware. Haven't been able to fathom it, although I've been using the stuff for so long!

>
>More properly, in the '70s Larry was an engineer while Bill was a
>nerd. Not that there's anything wrong with that... There _is_
>something wrong with how they've both acted since then.
>

and Balmer was already snorting weird stuff. :-) Very right about the acting! Some of the antics were(are) truly ridiculous.

Still, at least Larry doesn't come up with a new "paradigm" every time Steve Jobs comes up with a new Mac...

Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam Received on Tue Jan 22 2002 - 07:16:14 CST