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

[John Forkosh]

Arne Vajh??j <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> On 11/10/2022 10:47 PM, John Forkosh wrote:
>> Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>>> But, that said, I miss commercial grade operating systems that are
>>> database-centric with the filesystem and database being integrated.  I
>>> think that is a good approach for commercial applications, what we once
>>> called "ADP."  Perhaps the future isn't VMS but I would like to see some
>>> of the concepts within VMS integrated into future commercial systems.
>>>
>>> As software becomes more and more expensive, I think the need to have an
>>> efficient operating system that provides database features in the kernel
>>> becomes more important.
>> 
>> I gotta disagree there. Decomposing the environment lets you migrate
>> applications more easily if that becomes necessary or desirable.
>> Like if mysql or msql provides all necessary dbms functionality,
>> they're typically pretty easy to install just about anywhere.
>> Even more generally, I usually try to abstract the dbms needs
>> of an application by writing a little library of glue functions,
>> whereby the application never directly makes any dbms calls at all,
>> just issues calls to the glue functions, which isolate the dbms and
>> can then be written/rewritten to work with whatever dbms is convenient.
> 
> Most probably pick an existing glue layer instead of writing one.
> C: ODBC, C++: ODBC or ADO, Java: JDBC, C#/VB.NET: ADO.NET (IDb*),
> PHP: PDO, Python: DB API 2.0 etc..
> Arne

Thanks, Arne. Yeah, but I adopted this approach back in the 1980s,
mostly under VMS/C, before that stuff was available. In particular,
under a contract with Chase, developing a trading system for their
treasury desk, where traders couldn't easily determine prices for
off-the-run issues. But I got a good look at, and chance to play
with, trading desks using Sun and Apollo workstations, which just
blew away the 780 I was using, and at maybe one-tenth (just pulling
that number out of my elbow) the price. So it became abundantly
clear, to me, which way the world was turning, and I wanted to be
sure stuff I was developing would be as portable as possible, e.g.,
got rid of all the descrip and rtl stuff, encapsulating them
in little libraries that could be rewritten for unix without
involving the 50,000 or so lines of business logic and front end
stuff.  ( Oh, and I still fondly recall that project's vp manager,
Steve Allen... my preceding Chase contract had me reporting to
Kate Smith. Go figure :)
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j at f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )