[Info-vax] OpenVMS STARTUP Whitepaper

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-12-11 05:28:30 +0000, David Jones said:

> On Thursday, December 10, 2020 at 8:57:16 PM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> SQLite can be useful for storing the data, particularly for those 
>> without Oracle licenses and that for whatever reason.
> 
> Using Oracle in your startup sequencer means you have to start it 
> before you can run the thing that starts it -- somewhat problematic. A 
> cloud-based database still needs the network running. I link the 
> startup driver application statically with the sqlite3 library and run 
> it with the data file flagged as immutable (readonly, no locking).

Or the user or the system runs the database shenanigans as needed, 
generating the startup file once, and caching that startup. That 
generation happening either on demand, or on shutdown. Again, this ties 
back to installation and kit integration, and of automating these and 
other  system management tasks.

Caching is how other systems boot quickly. Not by running database 
queries. Not by doing device configurations, either. Caching is how 
folks run searches quickly, too. Optimizing for low storage or for low 
memory makes little sense in this era, given the un-VAX-like 
availability of disk space—albeit in 2 TiB hunks—and given the 
availability of memory.

Should the startup cache somehow become corrupted, boot 
conversationally and SET /STARTUP and bypass and regenerate it.

In my Computing Happy Place and beyond automatic startup processing, 
the OpenVMS system detects the corrupted startup or other corrupt boot 
caches, and can also detect bad system parameters, and the system then 
regenerates the associated caches automatically, and makes limited 
additional attempt to continue with the bootstrap normally. These 
limited retry attempts to avoid triggering a boot loop. But that 
Computing Happy Place is not today.

Can't see much reason to use Oracle Rdb or Oracle Classic here, given 
the costs and the availability of that package. But other folks have 
licenses and will consider using Oracle. Hence my comment. And yes, 
SQLite queries could run at boot. But... why? We already run a cached 
startup. It's just one that's manually edited and manually maintained.




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