[Info-vax] wrong file format

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/6/2021 9:14 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2021-01-06 23:33:59 +0000, 1tim.lovern at gmail.com said:
>> that is because the philosophy of Unix, at least in the early days, 
>> was to treat everything as a stream. This made the I/O the same for 
>> files, devices, whatever. At the time it was pretty elegant. You had a 
>> unified view of the world.  VMS and other operating systems took a 
>> different approach and differentiated between files and devices. They 
>> also wanted a presence in the commercial space, so the idea of using 
>> ISAM as the native file system made a lot of sense. Having the OS know 
>> about file structures made applications easier to play together.
>>
>> Unix makes every application have to know about the metadata for a 
>> file, VMS manages the metadata for you.  You can discover all kinds of 
>> things about a file simply by asking VMS to open the file and fill in 
>> all the data structures, FAB, XAB, etc.  Unix will tell you if you 
>> opened the file and if you hit the end of the file.
> 
> What's called Unix is fairly varied, and most of the distros are past 
> the point when apps need to consider record-level activities or 
> file-level metadata.
> 
> Past the universal debugger printf tool, that is...
> 
> The file system and metadata underpinnings analogous to RMS are widely 
> available, or are integrated.
> 
> I find the local Unix systems much easier to work with than OpenVMS, 
> with lower coding effort, far better development tools, and better file 
> system support.

Almost everything is available on Linux. They have the benefits of being
big dog.

> Reading and writing app data into those files is vastly easier, whether 
> for loading and saving "preferences"-style data, marshalling or 
> unmarshalling app data, or using the integrated SQL support.

Lots of relational databases are available for Linux.

There are not as many available for VMS, but there are several
available (Rdb, MySQL/MariaDB, Mimer, SQLite, HSQLDB, H2, Derby etc.).

If someone on VMS want to use a relational database, then it
is possible.

> I haven't had to mess around with file system data structures or such, 
> and—thankfully—haven't had to deal with anything as involved as RMS and 
> its interfaces. And with better results.
> 
> With OpenVMS, I'm finding it easier and faster with various apps to 
> bypass RMS and access the storage as sectors—stream access might be 
> easier, but sector access are what we have available.

????

SYS$QIO(W) with IO$_READLBLK or what?

> OpenVMS not having an integrated relational database, as is the case 
> with the local Unix distro...  Ugh.

I don't think Linux got an integrated relational database.

Most distro's probably offer a few of them (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL,
SQLite etc.) in their package repo.

But as mentioned above then relational databases are also
available for VMS.

Would it make a big change if VSI included a bunch of them as
options as part of VMS "distro"?

I really doubt it.

Anyone on VMS that want a relational database should be able to
get it quite easily.

Arne