[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/26/2023 4:24 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 2/26/2023 3:14 PM, bill wrote:
>> On 2/26/2023 10:05 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>> On 2023-02-25 13:00, Neil Rieck wrote:
>>>> comment: ISAM was important elsewhere on VMS including the fact that 
>>>> SYSUAF.DAT was indexed
>>>
>>> Yeah, I don't think anything in RSTS/E or RSX on the system level 
>>> used indexed files. VMS I know a little bit less, but since RMS 
>>> integration went deeper in VMS, I'm not surprised if more things made 
>>> use of it.
>>
>> Today, it is hard to imagine any reason for using ISAM/VSAM.  Small
>> Simple Databases like MySQL/MariaDB or SQLite can do a better job
>> and in most cases are probably just as easy to understand.
> 
> RDBMS would be the default today. SQLite for embedded.
> MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL or commercial for server.
> 
> There are still use cases for ISAM or to use a more
> modern term NoSQL key value store. But I believe there
> is little intersection between those use cases and
> the use cases for Cobol today. Cobol is used for
> money and money is stored in RDBMS.

I just saw some statistics on database type usage:

https://thenewstack.io/how-to-choose-the-right-database-in-2023

RDBMS            71.9%
Document Store   10.4%
Key Value Store   5.7%
Search Engine     4.4%
Wide Column Store 2.9%
Graph DB          1.8%

RDBMS is definitely king.

For those that wonder what products these categories cover:

RDBMS = Oracle DB, MS SQLServer, IBM DB2, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL etc.
Document Store = MongoDB, CouchDB etc.
Key Value Store = BDB, RocksDB etc.
Search Engine = Lucene
Wide Column Store = Cassandra, HBase etc.
Graph DB = Neo4j, OrientDB etc.

Arne