[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-08-22 19:07:01 +0000, David Froble said:

> As someone who has implemented several database systems, I find this 
> discussion entertaining, and educational.  Getting my nose rubbed in 
> some things I didn't know about, and seeing some different 
> perspectives.  A good thing.

Careful.  You're going to lose your "devil's advocacy" membership card, 
if you keep that up.  :-)

> One specific, I was never very fond of multi-volume disk sets.

Bound-volume sets were weird, and rather unique.  And not something I'd 
prefer to tangle with these days.  Though a Unix file system with mount 
points can look vaguely familiar.

> I know why they existed, but didn't like them.  RAID is better.  
> Probably I'm just too set in some ways, but, I do like to have separate 
> disks.  I REALLY like to have a separate system disk.

Virtual volumes with RAID is quite slick; entirely synthetic disk 
storage.  Some of these controllers actually don't allocate the storage 
from the pool until it's written to, too.  This is quite reminiscent of 
virtual memory with demand-zero paging, but for disk storage.

In general, the more I can offload the particulars and the details of 
the data storage to the OS code (moving the bytes among memory, cache, 
SSD, disks and whatever else is involved), the more I like it.   If the 
file system can swap in the whole file and generate my data structures 
for me, so much the better.

Yes, whether you need or want to run solely from memory depends on 
various application-specific factors.  Some folks will prefer to have 
their data always written to disk.  Some other folks will replicate 
data across servers and will use battery backup and related hardware to 
keep the data available across failures, and without involving rotating 
rust.)

> Regardless, I think the majority of the above can be summed up very 
> easily.  HP HAS NOT CONTINUED DEVELOPMENT OF VMS and IMPLEMENTATION OF 
> MORE UP TO DATE FEATURES IN VMS!

Certainly not in comparison to the rate of change on some other platforms.

> Sometimes I hate it when JF is right ...

I'm sure he won't mind.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC