[Info-vax] Other than Oracle, What MySQL/DBMS options are there for OpenVms?

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2019-03-26 kl. 03:23, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
> On 3/25/2019 9:02 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 3/25/2019 7:31 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 3/25/2019 4:27 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>>> Den 2019-03-25 kl. 20:37, skrev Denys Beauchemin:
>>>>> Jon was exactly correct, I apologize for not being clearer in my
>>>>> original answer.  Yes, the Postgres client works very well on OpenVMS
>>>>> and allows the application on OpenVMS to have full communication with a
>>>>> Postgres server on any platform that supports it.
>>>>>
>>>>> We are helping customers transform their OpenVMS code from Rdb access to
>>>>> Postgres access and that way the application can remain on OpenVMS for
>>>>> the foreseeable future.
>>>>
>>>> Why would staying with Rdb be an issue for staying with VMS?
>>>> Apart from the costs, of course.
>>>
>>> Cost if often a very important factor in business
>>> decisions.
>>>
>>> Besides that and with the caveat of not knowing much about
>>> neither RDB nor PostgreSQL, then I would expect RDB to be
>>> lacking some features among what has become common in
>>> databases within the last 20 years.
>>>
>>> If you say that >90% of users do not need those
>>> features, then I will say that you are probably right.
>>
>> That's some rather rash speculation, unless you have some justification. 
>>   Just because HP ignored VMS doesn't mean Oracle ignored RDB.
> 
> It is my clear impression that Oracle has provided fine support
> for RDB, but I do not think they have evolved the product that much.
> 
> Version number wise RDB has taken 23 years to go from 7.0 to 7.3.
> 
> But we can check. Can someone with extensive RDB knowledge
> tell what RDB support from the list below:
> * CTE in SQL

Seems to be a kind of sub-select. Some sources talked about "self-join"
(where a table is joined to itself) but that is no problem in Rdb
as fas I know. I probably know too little about "CTE"... :-)

> * full text search

No, but I do not see the use in typical business applications.

> * N data types

Is that the NCHAR and similar Unicode types? Yes, you can specify
Unicode or UTF8 as a character set for a column.

> * BLOB and CLOB data types (with 1 GB or more max size)

Yes. Stored as "segments" with up to 64 Kbyte sizes. No known
max size for each BLOB.

> * XML and JSON data types

Not as specific data types in the tables. But XML available
as unload/load file formats.

> * geospatial data types

Not as specific data types, no.

> * stored procedures in other languages than SQL

Yes.
"User-defined functions allow you to execute subprograms written either
in 3GL host languages (such as C or SQL Module language) or in the SQL
procedural language."

> * encrypted connections

This is harder. Rdb doesn't have a central database engine like most other
DB's has. All database processing is done in the user processes. So local
applications never "connects" to Rdb. Remote applications connects through
RDBREMOTE or SQL/Services, and that can use any encryption available in
your network setup like IPSec, I guess.


> ?
> 
>> However, if all data used to be on VMS, then there would be the need for 
>> another non-VMS server, and the expertise to use it.
> 
> Most VMS users has experience with other OS these days.
> 
> Linux, Windows, maybe some classic Unix.
> 
> Arne
>