[Info-vax] VSI roadmap

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/18/2023 10:12 AM, dthi... at gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, August 17, 2023 at 7:10:15 PM UTC-4, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> The roadmap just says:
>> 
>> <quote> * VDD (replacement for CDD) </quote>
>> 
>> I don't know anything about VDD.
>> 
>> Maybe some VSI people can enlighten us.
>> 
>> It could be important for sites still using CDD today.
>> 
>> I have not used CDD since late 80's/early 90's and I hated it.
> 
> While CDD made multi-language synchronization of record layouts
> easier ON VMS, it made it difficult when you wanted to move/port code
> to other platforms, which did not have language compiler constructs
> for accessing CDD. We moved part of our application suite to Linux to
> take advantage of some OS features, and needed to extract the record
> layouts into include files for the Linux compilers. From that point
> on, we found it easier to instruct our programmers to keep extracted
> include file directories in synch rather than maintain the VMS-only
> CDD layouts in combination with the include layouts.

Sector 7 have a VX/CDD product for Linux.

But yes it is a portability problem.

I am also skeptical about how well it fits into a modern data strategy.

The dream of:
* have all data at a central server
* have all data definitions at a central server
* have all applications access the central data using the central data 
definitions
may have seemed right in the 1980's.

But big companies today:
- has data on dozens/hundreds/thousands of servers
- data are a mix of structured and un-structured
- data is accessed using one or two handfulls of languages/frameworks on 
multiple platforms from hundreds/thousands/tens-of-thousands of servers

CDD does not make much sense as a corporate strategy in such an environment.

But it is obviously needed for those VMS applications that use it and 
are being migrated from Alpha/Itanium to x86-64.

Arne