[Info-vax] wrong file format

[1tim....@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, January 6, 2021 at 8:39:33 PM UTC-7, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 1/6/2021 7:02 PM, 1tim.... at gmail.com wrote:
> > RMS could be improved in a large number of ways. I'd really like to see some set operations, where you can operate on a number of records as a group. 
> > 
> > Like a sys$get_recordset, where you specify a simple range on a key. i.e. Key 1, from "AA" to "DD". one of the arguments would have to be a buffer large enough to hold the returned data. Today, we do these things in code layered on top of RMS.
> Recordsets would not have been reasonable in 1978. They are reasonable 
> today because of today's memory sizes.
> > sys$put_recordset 
> > sys$update_recordset 
> > sys$delete_recordset 
> > 
> > etc. 
> > 
> > A set of records is what most businesses are dealing with, like item lookups based on attributes, getting order history, processing lines on an order, etc. 
> > 
> > then as a next go round, maybe simple joins on keys...but that begins to increase complexity, where maybe a native RDB or OODB starts making sense.
> What you're suggesting is pretty much what decent RDBMS products 
> provide, along with many other advantages. 
> 
> Rdb should have been made a part of the normal VMS distribution. It 
> would have made VMS much more desirable, and locked more people into 
> it's advantages. 
> 
> In my own personal opinion, and I'm biased, the greatest flaw of RMS was 
> not including record and field definitions associated with ISAM and 
> Relative files. RDBMS products do this. My bias is that I have an old 
> product that does just that. 
> 
> 
> -- 
> David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450 
> Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: da... at tsoft-inc.com 
> DFE Ultralights, Inc. 
> 170 Grimplin Road 
> Vanderbilt, PA 15486

So do I, a product with a data dictionary and routines that use it to get at data.
Short of making a relational or object oriented Database part of the OS, some extensions to RMS would go a long ways to being useful and shouldn't be that hard to implement. Once you start wandering into relational operators and joins, stuff get more complex and at that point you really should have a database...