Exploring DEC Rdb/VMS

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.

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!!?

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.

My professional work with Rdb ended with version 6.1. My professional work with Oracle extends to about 2001.

As I said, I did a point by point comparison between the two about ten years ago. It was amazingly close. I tried, as much as I could, to avoid my bias towards the one I learned first.

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! Received on Sat Oct 16 2004 - 14:34:04 CEST