Re: How to make RDBMS ?

From: <D_at_B.A>
Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2002 18:31:19 GMT
Message-ID: <XxmZ7.4109$cD4.7701_at_www.newsranger.com>


In article <QTjZ7.47$Nq6.2667_at_petpeeve.ziplink.net>, David Cressey says...
>
>Todd,
>
>> I have lately come to believe that this is a misconception. What is
>> undeniably true is that the OS problem was attacked first, but I think the
>> DB problem is inherently simpler.
>>
>
>I can't speak to the problem in general, but when I took the course on
>Oracle Rdb internals, one of the students had taken VMS internals. He
>expected Rdb to be much simpler than VMS, and he was surprised. By his
>assessment the complexity of the two products was on the same order. This
>is just one person's opinion.
>
>I had actually taught the internals of a much earlier OS, and I also think
>the complexity is of the same order.
>
>((just in case: VMS is the operating system built by DEC for their VAX and
>ALPHA computers. Oracle Rdb is the relational database built by DEC to run
>on the VAX and ALPHA. VMS is currently owned by Compaq, maybe soon HP.
>Oracle Rdb is currently owned by Oracle.

That might have been true in the past but certainly not today. Optimizer alone has so many areas that the industry implemented only a tiny bit of the research available. Database features are coming with the speed that makes very hard for ordinary database application developer to keep up. User programmed domains, extensible indexing, user-defined statistics to name just a few oracle features. (I didn't meet any index developer yet, however;-).

In short, there is so much database does already, and will do in the future, whereas operating system area is pretty much frozen. Received on Fri Jan 04 2002 - 19:31:19 CET

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