[Info-vax] OpenVMS x86-64 and RDB and DB's in general on OpenVMS

[David Froble]

Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> JF Mezei skrev den 2015-06-30 21:12:
>> On 15-06-30 09:08, clairgrant71 at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> Porting Oracle and Rdb to VMS are both huge, but very different, 
>>> undertakings.
>>
>>
>> On the one hand, one is told that for most ports, it is just a matter of
>> recompiling.  (I realise there is the cost/trouble of testing/validating
>> etc).
>>
>> What sort of system features would Oracle and RDB use which are
>> architecture specific and require much work to port from one 64 bit
>> architecture to another on the same opertating system ?
> 
> The specific architecture in itself!
> 
> Today Rdb produces IA64 machine code on the fly (and before that
> VAX and Alpha naitive machine code), and that will need to be
> ported to X86 machine code. The same for the pre-compilers that
> also compiles the SQL EXEC, END EXEC sections into machine code.

This leads me to ask whether some people made some bad decisions in the 
past ....

But, I really don't know what I'm talking about, so I'd ask first, what 
is meant by "machine code"?  On the VAX is this just Macro-32?  If so, 
then I'm not sure why that was ever changed, since Macro-32 is supported 
on Alpha and the itanic, and in the future on x86.  Then again, "machine 
code" could be something that can be executed without a compile/assemble 
and link.

> There is also a need for a supported X86 version of BLISS. The
> lack of that made the "Rdb8 for NT" to be canceled. That is
> probably also need for VMS in itself, anyway... :-)
> 
> Here are two documents that talkes about the port to Itanium.
> 
> http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/products/rdb/pdf/rdbtf05_itaniumport.pdf
> 
> http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v14/rdb_interp_compile.pdf
> 
>