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

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 17 May 2012 20:03:46 -0400, David Froble wrote:

> 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?
> 
> :-)

Good question.  Document it and stash stuff in scripts and procedures 
while the going is good I suppose.

And go for whatever the future's equivalent of an iPad is, when it comes 
to the crunch. :-)

> 
> 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.

One of my early goes with MySQL scrambled a simple shopping list without 
notice, and that's where I started looking elsewhere.  MySQL has come a 
long way since then, but lesson learned: take copious backups.  One of 
the beauties of running virtual machines is that I can simply restore the 
whole OS as a last resort.  Belt and braces.

> My solution is industrialized dumps of tables to text files on
> a periodic basis.

Ditto.

-- 
Paul Sture