Andrew Grillet wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 MB> Platform independent database engines don't exactly seem like the wave
 MB> of the future to me.  

 AG> Oracle is totally committed to Platfrom independent
 AG> database. They give away free copies of their OS/2 offering
 AG> - phone them and ask. Its a great product - industrial
 AG> strength etc, but does not have the front end that dBase
 AG> has. (Neither does DB/2_).

That's not what I meant!  Supporting multiple platforms is a great idea,
and Oracle has done a good job of it.  However, this is not the same thing
as writing a platform-independent database and trying to run it everywhere,
which will suffer from an enormous performance problem.

 MB> It has never really been an OS/2 market, but
 MB> this is primarily because OS/2 is not especially strong at database
 MB> serving by comparison with, say, Unix.  

 AG> Can't see why it shouldnt be though. Conceptually OS/2's 
 AG> multitasking is more suited to database serving than Unix's.

This is true, although POSIX now copies the OS/2 thread model.  The
"fork" call was always an abomination.

 AG> IBM could go far on this. I presume they are afraid of
 AG> taking market from mainframes - this is a doomed strategy.
 AG> They should know from the history of the mini and micro that
 AG> the technology will take the business if its cheaper, even
 AG> if IBM dont supply the product. (Same to DEC with knobs on).

On the contrary, IBM now offers POSIX compliance with OS/390 (ex-MVS).

 MB> On the other hand, there are
 MB> people who take NT seriously as a database server, and that is
 MB> inexplicable. 

 AG> Never tried it, but the magazines said it handled more users
 AG> than OS/2 on the same hardware. 

Yes, and they were queued into the street!

 AG> Given the fact that the number of database servers must be
 AG> growing  fast, while the games market mst be saturating, IBM
 AG> really ought to try to get OS/2 into the server market.
 AG> Compaines with less than 100 people are really not going to
 AG> go for big iron, cos they don't have the skills to support
 AG> it. They normally have PC literate people though.

Customers choose software first, then operating systems to match software,
and then hardware to match operating systems.  This is why IBM still has a
roaring success in the AS/400, certainly a machine with some shortcomings.

 AG> ... When I was a lad, you could get an O/S on a 360k floppy disk...

I like that!
 
-- Mike


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