[Info-vax] Maybe a bit OT, maybe not.. in any case an interesting article

[David Froble]

Paul Sture wrote:
> I suppose that with the benefit of hindsight I started my migration 10 
> years ago when I got my first Mac.
> 
> On Tue, 15 May 2012 08:47:08 -0500, Bob Koehler wrote:
> 
>> In article <4fb19c4e$0$282$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
>> =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
>>> Your server side stuff are in ASP.NET and SQLServer stored procedures.
>>    My server side stuff is in RMS.  SQL cannot be found.
> 
> Stuff I would have at one time put into RMS now goes into some for of SQL.
> 
> SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL.
> 
> SQLite is extremely handy for one off stuff and has approximately zero 
> overhead in terms of administration and system resources.  It doesn't use 
> the server / client model of the other two; it is standalone, and 
> available on many platforms.  Indeed it has been pointed out to me that 
> if it had been around earlier it could have replaced various bits of VMS 
> which depend on RMS, not to mention things like the PCSI databases.
> 
>>> Your documents and other files are in Sharepoint.
>>    My documents and other files are in Files-11 ODS-5.
> 
> Spread across OS X, Linux and Windows, with duplication where appropriate 
> (ease of access, plus "not all my eggs in one basket" principle).
> 
>>> Your emails and calendar information is in Exchange.
>>    My email is in VMS mail and my calendar information is in
>>    DECW$CALENDAR.
> 
> Nowadays my mail lives on IMAP, and rsync'd on a daily basis to a couple 
> of different systems.  Calendar items live on the Mac, but can be 
> published to a web site if required.
> 
>>> All the
>>> documents are in Word and Excel formats.
>>    All the documents are in DSR.  No spreadsheets.
> 
> At one time all my documents were in DSR (and various word processing 
> packages I have used over the years haven't come close to DSR's ability 
> to produce numbered lists :-) ).   Nowadays a mixture of Pages on the Mac 
> and LibreOffice.
> 
>>> You have some only
>>> work in IE web apps. You have desktop apps written in .NET.
>>    All my web apps have been tested with lynx.  My desktops apps are
>>    written in Fortran, C, DCL, and BLISS.
> 
> Web apps in a CMS, although given the constant PHP based attacks I have 
> started looking at Python etc solutions which generate static HTML.  For 
> desktop stuff a mixture of Objective-C for the Mac, COBOL, Fortran, C and 
> DCL for VMS, whatever packages take my fancy on Linux (99% in C/C++).
> 
>>> It will take many years to migrate of.
>>>
>>>
>>    I have no plans to migrate.
> 
> Fair enough.
> 
> 
> 

How you gonna keep track of all this diverse stuff when you start/continue to get senile?

:-)

The thing I don't like about SQL databases is, if something bad happens, it's a lot harder 
to get your data out of them.  Yes, they are a lot more user friendly than RMS and such 
many times.  But there is a cost for that.  My solution is industralized dumps of tables 
to text files on a periodic basis.