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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 10/16/2022 7:32 PM, kemain.nospam at gmail.com wrote:
>> From: Info-vax <info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com> On Behalf Of Craig A. Berry via Info-vax
>> Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2022 8:11 PM
>>> As example:
>>> <https://www.indeed.com/q-Openvms-jobs.html?vjk=aca6c8029c23b35e>
>>> "The Client calculates and processes approximately $8 billion of school
>> funding annually. The data processing systems used are a mix of COBOL and
>> SAS programs; running on an OpenVMS mainframe; reading from Oracle
>> databases, SAS datasets, and flat files; and writing to SAS datasets and flat
>> files."
>>
>> You also neglected to mention that the job is "replacing COBOL and SAS on
>> OpenVMS with Python on Windows and SQL server databases."  So it's not a
>> VMS job and soon won't be a VMS shop.
> 
> Define "soon" ...
> 
> Seen many "projects" that start up based on some new CIO with Windows
> background (likely propped up by Microsoft Sales types) try to make a
> name for themselves and then a few years later after not delivering
> anything close to a comparative system is off looking for a new job.
It is their stated intention.

Time will show if it happens.

Experience shows that a significant number of large IT projects
fail.

I don't think is specific for migrations to Windows.

> I say a CIO with Windows background because any self respecting CIO
> with UNIX background would at least try and keep the same database -
> Oracle.
If they needed to migrate from old Oracle DB on VMS to current
Oracle on Linux and they did not have Oracle DB on Linux but
have SQLServer on Windows, then it makes sense to pick the
latter no matter what background the CIO have.

> Also, replacing a compiled application with an interpreted language??

Python for data processing? Sure! Why not!

There is a company called Google that until a few years ago
processed all the public web pages in the world with Python.

Arne