[Info-vax] wrong file format

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/7/2021 3:35 PM, 1tim.... at gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, January 7, 2021 at 11:24:06 AM UTC-7, Stephen Hoffman
> wrote:
>> On 2021-01-07 17:44:40 +0000, 1tim.... at gmail.com said:
>>> 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...
>> Given there's a widely-used, portable, and robust SQL database
>> already ported to OpenVMS, and the port was integrated with the
>> lock manager, and it's free... ...Tweaks around the edges of RMS
>> which would require app code changes, and replacing or acquiring
>> CDD/Repository—for a fraction of what SQL provides—don't seem
>> optimal.

> Don't disagree with what you are saying, but going to a database is a
> "rip and replace" option, vs incorporating some convenient features
> into legacy code.

 > If I'm supporting a large application with a large codebase, I'm not
 > interested in ripping out the guts and making it use a relational
 > database. I am, however, interested in making incremental
 > improvements and simplifying code where possible.

If the code was very well structured then the changes of switching
to a RDBMS would be isolated to some persistence code (Data Access Layer
if one likes that term).

Unfortunatetly we don't always live in a perfect world.

> The ROI isn't there for most companies to replace the existing file
> system. The ROI is there to fold in incremental improvements in the
> course of doing enhancements and new development. The ability to do
> sets of data easily makes importing and exporting data to outside
> systems easier, or exposing data via web services easier. It's a lot
> easier to create a service that grabs a bunch of records in a single
> call than to have to loop and accumulate the data for the call. I
> suspect many of us have had to implement something like this. (Yes,
> solutions like Connex exist)

Some things are hard to do incremental. Switching from RMS
index-sequential files to relational database may be one
of them - at least I don't see 100% idx -> 75% idx + 25% rdbms ->
50% idx + 50% rdbms -> 25% idx + 75% rdbms -> 100% rdbms as
am easy road. Unless we are talking totally isolated applications.

> It's funny how years later, clever code usually turns out to not be.

Oh yes.

Arne