Re: Pre-relational, post-relational, 1968 CODASYL "Survey of Data Base Systems"
Date: Mon, 03 May 2004 08:16:52 -0600
Message-ID: <ur7u1ioiz.fsf_at_mail.comcast.net>
"Ken North" <knorth2_at_deletethis.yahoo.com> writes:
> At a database conference in 1998, I heard that IBM was actually experiencing an
> increase in the number of IMS licensees. Companies were bringing in consultants
> and veteran developers for Y2K. Perhaps they were also using them to work
> through an application development backlog on some legacy hardware.
>
> IMS may prove to be as venerable as the C-47 (DC3) aircraft.
back to previous post ... the physical (some number of IMS developers in stl/bldg 90)/rdbms (systemr in sjr/bldg 28) trade-off argument was admin/support overhead for changes to structure vis-a-vis disk space requirements and overhead for maintaining indexes (although rdbms still have significant manual care&feeding). if you've matured to relatively stable application feature environment ... there may not be a whole lot of re-org required ... significantly mitigating the admin and manual effort issue.
the c47/dc3 analogy is somewhat with out-of-the-way, low-volume operations. some number of the IMS &/or VSAM (non-rdbms) operations just keep getting moved to larger and larger machines. some of the largest infrastructures have large numbers of largest configured, maxed out mainframes using it for critical business operations. these continue to represent significant revenue flow ... especially with all the stuff about processing-unit based pricing.
-- Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/Received on Mon May 03 2004 - 16:16:52 CEST