Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

Thanks Jerry,

This seems a most reasonable, logical explanation for the current state of things. And I guess it still explains why OO databases are not catching on as fast as predicted today. The issue of flexibility, the fact that the corporate database should be able to support several generations of several Application programs ... and of course the "critical mass" effect and the backing of major corporate players like IBM must have done the rest.

Seun Osewa.

"Jerry Gitomer" <jgitomer_at_erols.com> wrote in message news:<pan.2003.10.08.00.29.56.505916_at_erols.com>...
> The RDBMS wound up as the most popular approach to DBMS for practical
> business reasons. The premier DBMS at the time of the introduction of
> Oracle (the first RDBMS to hit the market) was IBM's IMS. IMS was much
> faster than Oracle and, given the concern about system performance in an
> era where supercomputers didn't have the performance of a Pentium, the
> fact that Oracle and subsequent RDBMS became more popular was due to the
> one factor which concerned businesses even more than bang for the buck.
>
> This was the cost of maintaining a working system. The primary advantage
> of the RDBMS over its predecessors in the 1970's was that the RDBMS was
> dynamic, while most of its predecessors were static. By that I mean that
> if the world changed it was easy to change the RDBMS model and code to
> meet the changing conditions. This was not the case with the
> alternatives.
>
> IMS was designed to optimize performance and, from what I recall, was very
> difficult to change. Even trivial changes in the real world could result
> in massive reprogramming efforts. Things were so bad that in some cases
> once the world started to change the programmers could barely keep pace
> and the use of a database became a liability rather than an asset.
Received on Wed Oct 08 2003 - 11:40:02 CEST