Re: Exploring DEC Rdb/VMS
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 12:47:16 GMT
Message-ID: <kL8cd.480574$8_6.169191_at_attbi_s04>
"Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote in message news:T8OdnXtqgJrViOzcRVn-2Q_at_comcast.com...
>
> If you are curious, you can look at online Documentation for DEC Rdb/VMS at:
> www.oracle.com/rdb and navigate to the online manuals. I am not
> recommending you do this, however, unless your curiosity is insatiable. The
> market for this product is basically capped.
Cool. I'll browse around.
> There are different stories among DEC alumni (formerly called "digits") as
> to the fundamental reason why Rdb was built. Of these stories, there are
> only two I believe: first, to leverage the sale of VAXes (called "VAXen");
> second, because it was COOL!
> Oracle was clearly built to be platform independent. The Oracle people
> don't want to lock you into IBM, or HP, or Burroughs, or anyone else. They
> just want to lock you into Oracle. Isn't that wonderful!!?
Heh. I learned this term "commoditize your compliments" and a lot of things make more sense since then.
> Those two orientations inform most, maybe all, of the engineering
> differences between the two products. Learning Oracle helped me understand
> "Relational DBMSes" a whole lot better, just as learning my second OS
> helped me to understand operating systems a whole lot better.
Yeah!
> As the St. Pauli Girl beer commercials say: "you never forget your first
> girl". I guess that applies to General Information Retrieval Languages as
> well!
I learned another acronym recently, "Leaking Underground Storage Tanks." It's a big enviro-hazard database, and it's uniformly referred to by its acronym. :-)
Marshall Received on Sat Oct 16 2004 - 14:47:16 CEST