Re: Date's First Great Blunder

From: Dawn M. Wolthuis <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 22:32:15 -0500
Message-ID: <c6cn4k$gc4$1_at_news.netins.net>


"Anthony W. Youngman" <wol_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:bctxsCK02ViAFw5i_at_thewolery.demon.co.uk...
> In message <cZYhc.32931$h44.4905402_at_stones.force9.net>, Paul
> <paul_at_test.com> writes
> >Dawn M. Wolthuis wrote:
<snip>

> But we keep on coming across examples, again and again, where the Pick
> system is taken as the reference spec. Countless dollars and experts'
> hours later (usually more dollars than were spent on the Pick system in
> its entire life) the relational system is still inferior or, often,
> unusable.
>
> The others on this newsgroup will be getting sick of this example - the
> company porting off UniVerse to snoracle where experts spent SIX MONTHS
> tuning a single (complex) query to try and outperform Pick. Finally,
> they knocked 30 seconds off the Pick system's five-minutes run time.
> They were oh so proud - until it was pointed out that Snoracle had twin
> Xeons and gigabytes of ram. Pick had a P90.
>
> Oh - and the guy looking after the Pick system was run-of-the-mill, not
> an expert.

I've heard so many wonderful anecdotes like this that perhaps the best emperical data related to implementations of various data models that we could get would be to collect such anecdotes from all angles. I'm sure there are MUMPS (e.g. Cache') anecdotes too. I have even heard a few -- not many, but a few -- relational database anecdotes. I would like to hear more -- particularly stories when a business converted from something other than IMS, IDMS, or another RDBMS to an RDBMS and ended up with a big win on their hands. I'm sure that wouldn't be a cdt thing to write up, but it could be used as one part of some actual emperical data related to various data models, maybe, perhaps?

Anyway, good story, Wol. --dawn Received on Sat Apr 24 2004 - 05:32:15 CEST

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