Re: Oracle versus Sqlserver

nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam (Nuno Souto) wrote in message news:<3c4d5fe2.5074894_at_news-vip.optusnet.com.au>...
> Joel Garry doodled thusly:
>
> >> First, Oracle was NOT a commercial product in 1977. more like
> >> 1979/80.
> >
> >Correct, see history in Nov/Dec Oracle magazine.
>
> How timely! I've given up trying to get hold of it.
> Have subscribed to the mag about ten(10) times through the Net: hasn't
>
> shown up once yet... That site must be handled by SQL Server!

Or they don't know how to handle a non-US address :-)

>
> >
> >Tom Price: I remember when we went to Pratt & Whitney the first time,
> >we showed them all the system mods that they needed to put on their VM
> >systems so that they could run it, and they already had system mods on
> >all those same lines - local mods. It was a real mess.
>
>
> Hehehe! My boss back then wanted us to run SQL/DS on DOS/VSE with
> 600Kb main memory and an Assembler and RPG program base, slowly being
> converted to Cobol! Thank God my opinion prevailed.
>
> Cripes, what a site! I had to battle all the way to resignation
> before they replaced the punched cards with the 34xx magnetic diskette
> coder/readers. They wanted us to re-punch nearly 300 programs! Took
> less than a month once we got the diskettes running. Of course, the
> boss took the credit for the "innovation" and "increase in
> productivity". Who said Dilbert is new?

scottadams is an optimist.

I was lucky only to have to do cards in school. I was so happy to go directly to VT-52's. I vowed never to work on COBOL again, and to date have kept it with some minor exceptions (like links to old routines and bizarro layering of Oracle on old COBOL stuff).

>
>
> >
> >Some of the early Oracle installations were pretty bad too. But it
> >can (and has been) be argued that Oracle took the lead early.
>
>
> Exactly. Oracle with V4 in 1983/1984 was one of the few RDBMS
> available that could actually automatically recover to a consistent
> state after an OS crash. Ingres with its "advanced code" never did:
> it always needed manual intervention with that blessed "recoverdb"
> command...

Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me we've gone a bit backwards towards manual labor since the early O7 timeframe.

>
> >
> >I was first paid to work on a R database in 1981. I first saw Oracle
> >in '83. It seemed pretty good, but not as good as what I had worked
> >on. Later it came out that a lot of those V3 Oracle dbs were pretty
> >bogus...
>
> Hey! Mine at Prime did work fine! :-)

That's good to know! But horror stories are always so much more... interesting.

>
> >would work as fast relationally as the old hierarchical dbs. So
> >whether he was right or wrong in theory, I'd say he was wrong in fact
> >- that is, the commercial environment hasn't let his theories be
> >properly developed.
>
> Quite true. Fabian Pascal has always had a bone about precisely this.
> Still remember the reaction to some of his statements in Compuserve,
> back in 1990/91. Got himself expelled from most RDBMS fora. Pretty
> ridiculous, when the guy was one of the most ardent defenders of the
> relational DB model!

Hey, I jumped on him because he was blaming users for not properly designing and writing code when it was the vendors product limitations fault. There's a difference between ardent defense and improper accusation. He just spoke at a local users group meeting, I was going to go see him but got too busy at work.

Any of that old C$erve stuff archived anywhere? I pretty much stopped using it when usenet took off. But I never got rid of my account, using it as a business-only email, thinking the other ways I've had of accessing the net might go away at any time. Like @home is about to <sigh>. Of course, now that AOL is involved, the c$erve address is getting spammed big time. Like the 3 laws of thermodynamics, can't win, can't break even, can't leave the game. Cliff Stoll and that guy who wrote vi nothwithstanding.

>
> > Now we have objects, whatever that is.
>
> Join the club. One day someone will have to explain to me in English
> exactly _what_ have we gained from all that bloatware. Haven't been
> able to fathom it, although I've been using the stuff for so long!
>
> >
> >More properly, in the '70s Larry was an engineer while Bill was a
> >nerd. Not that there's anything wrong with that... There _is_
> >something wrong with how they've both acted since then.
> >
>
> and Balmer was already snorting weird stuff. :-)
> Very right about the acting! Some of the antics were(are) truly
> ridiculous.
>
> Still, at least Larry doesn't come up with a new "paradigm" every time
> Steve Jobs comes up with a new Mac...

Wish I had that old Forbes magazine with Larry on the cover spin-doctoring how they got caught illegally pre-booking sales ("The arrogance was inexcusable" he said, IIRC). Nothing about _that_ in the O magazine history, big surprise. circa 1990. Hmmm, maybe on e-bay...

jg

--
To those who talk about how $500 in MS would be $500,000 today, I say
for every Microsoft there were a dozen Kaypros and Ataris, and a
thousand DEC/Xerox/Wang/Prime/DG/Polaroids... Yes, I bought DEC as a
"bargain" after it fell from $199 to $30 in the '80s, because it had
the best engineered big-name rdb around.  Just ask Larry.  He snatched
it up for a mere $100,000,000.