Re: Wishing trolls away

Dawn M. Wolthuis wrote:
> That is what I used to think (and speak on). Then I had and saw teams of
> software developers working to make companies productive with SQL-based
> tools on SQL-DBMS's and the MV query language on MV databases. There really
> is no comparison from an "end-user" standpoint. And when trying to make
> companies that had been using MV query languages now happy or even satisfied
> with SQL-based products, it was pretty much impossible. It is my adventure
> with reporting tools and query languages that led me to believe that PICK
> had something that was both invisible to the industry and superior in many
> respects to what folks were doing (SQL).

My anecdotal experience of Pick has been that it was used for an online system where it seem to perform fairly well. But the data was exported every day to a SQL DBMS for use in queries, reports etc.

Quite often the data that would come over would be corrupted due to some internal problems with the Pick system. Whereas in the SQL system the only errors would be logical because the DBMS would make sure all the constraints were enforced.

Maybe the strength of Pick is for systems that do a lot of simultaneous editing and selecting of single records? Whereas the strength of relational is for performing complex queries? It seemed to me that Pick was very much a "front-end" system, and SQL/relational is very much a "back-end" system.

I've not had direct experience of Pick but my understanding was that kind of queries we needed (several layers of subselects, complicated EXISTS clauses, aggregation, etc.) would just be too much for Pick, both in terms of writing the queries, and running them.

Are there any free/open-source implementations of Pick-style DBMSs? It might be interesting to set up a Pick database and a SQL database on the same spec machine, with the same data, and see how they both cope with various queries. I've been re-reading the red/blue car exchange that was on this newsgroup a while ago; that may be a good one to try.

Paul. Received on Fri May 14 2004 - 12:52:03 CEST