[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-10-06 03:32:50 +0000, Greg Tinkler said:

> Yup, exactly, hence get CRTL to use RMS which does work.

For this case, RMS really doesn't work at all well. Says why right 
there in the name, too.  Record management, not stream management.

C and IP have both been tussling with mismatched assumptions within the 
OpenVMS file system since the instantiation of C on OpenVMS, too.

Lately, I've been tussling with the record-oriented assumptions within 
OpenVMS.  Records just never got as far along as objects. And RMS 
records are an unmitigated joy around upgrades and mixed-version 
clusters.

The various stream-format files are one of the ensuing compromises here.

> Re byte range locking, why not just use locking granularity  (aka Rdb) 
> to do the job.  Very efficient and has worked for decades, and no need 
> to change VMS DLM.

The use of Oracle Rdb isn't viable as a dependency for many folks, and 
lock granularity doesn't work at all well for arbitrary and overlapping 
locking ranges.

> Sure it may be nice to have an API that does this for us, but hey we 
> are programmers.

I don't want us each writing and debugging and maintaining 
range-locking code for what is part of the C standard library, but you 
do you.

As much as I'd like a general range-locking solution here in DLM, and 
with adding (better?) stream I/O support into RMS, and as much as I'd 
like to see OO API support added, and IP integration, and app and app 
security integration with sandboxes, packaging, and package management, 
and a whole pile of other badly-needed work, I'd infer that the folks 
at VSI really want PostgreSQL as an available database option soonest.

There's a very long history of "can-kicking" here and a whole lot of 
that is almost inherent and inevitable with the upward-compatibility 
goals for the platform, and with resulting miasma far less visible to 
those of us that have used OpenVMS for the past decade or three or 
more, but is front and center with any new developer looking at the 
APIs, and with any wholly new 64-bit app work.


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