[Info-vax] What does VMS get used for, these days?

[Dave Froble]

On 11/6/2022 1:18 PM, Robert Carleton wrote:
> On Sunday, November 6, 2022 at 7:55:23 AM UTC-6, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> First thing: VMS has heavyweight processes. There's a lot of stuff in the
>> process, so spawning off new processes takes a good while, and you don't do
>> it very often. Conceptually different than Unix and Unixalikes where the
>> processes are lightweight and the overhead of a fork is minimal so you fork
>> off a new process for nearly everything.
>>
>> Whereas the concept of "resources" in Linux is fairly simple, VMS has a lot
>> of different resources which are managed statically by the operating system.
>> Some of that resource management goes into making the processes more
>> heavyweight. This can be a powerful tool to keep multiple users from
>> interfering with one another on a system with limited resources. In a
>> scientific computing environment it can also be a pain in the neck because
>> people will run their job for three days and then hit a working set limit
>> and need to figure out what the limit really should be.
>>
>> But yes, some of the "big computer" batch features that you get with PBS and
>> OS/360 are present by default in VMS, and that's a nice thing. Using VMS on
>> a machine acting as a front-end to a high-speed computer was great.
>>
>> Mind you, the best batch management system in the world won't keep researchers
>> from paying the second shift operators under the table to move their jobs to
>> the front of the queue.
>> --scott
>>
>> --
>> "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
>
> Going a slightly different way, does files versioning help relieve the programmers from some of the work necessary to roll back a corrupted dataset when something goes wrong with their job? In the IBM world, they talk about the production control analysts managing the batch processing. I suppose file version control might be one of the tools that they use, maybe in organizations that have a lot of duty separation.
>

Question is way too vague for reasonable answers.  However, I personally would 
not consider file versions for any data issues.  BACKUP, and today's RDBMS 
systems with complex transactions, and such, might work for screw-ups, if I had 
any idea what screw-ups you might be considering.

My biggest use of multiple file versions was if I made some changes to a program 
that I didn't like.  Easy to revert to a prior version, or, to extract from a 
prior version some code you wish you hadn't deleted.

-- 
David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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