RE: What About Price vs. Performance?

No, Scott, it's my rather extensive experience with business application 
development in Unix and OS/400.  I was the Manager of Architecture at System 
Software Associates and responsible for the overall architecture of nearly two 
million lines of RPG code, 1/3 of which I designed and perhaps 10% of which I 
actually coded.  In addition, I designed and oversaw the development of over 2 
million lines of C code under OS/2 for our graphical client/server development 
- I wrote about 20% of that code.

When SSA decided to move to Unix (to support the platform independence that 
Leif loves so much, and that ultimately killed the company) I was the lead 
architect for the project which implemented all the basic functions of OS/400 
that weren't implemented in Unix, or at least weren't compatible with how the 
AS/400 worked, such as OVRxxxF, output queues, program calls, message files, 
program message queues, job descriptions and the like.  We basically had to 
emulate each of the OS/400 system objects and the standard OS/400 commands such 
as SNDPGMMSG and SBMJOB.

I was also involved with the conversion of native I/O to SQL.  I spent a lot of 
time trying to get Sybase to work, as well as Oracle.  Compared to DB2/400, 
both are incredible dogs, especially as file sizes reach the million-record 
mark.  Neither can support the level of data-driven database navigation 
required for an enterprise-level business application.  Today's BPCS is a 
bloated, careening mess, where what originally took 4,000 lines of RPG now 
takes some 44,000 lines of tool-generated SQLRPG.

So, yes, I'm pretty anti-Unix and anti-SQL, but I've got a lot of very good 
experience behind me to back up my opinion.  I have programmed my share of 
Unix, more than I care to, and while I love Unix (and awk and grep and yacc) 
for text processing (which is what web serving is all about, when you get down 
to it), it will never be an industrial-strength transaction-processing 
environment.

In my opinion.

Joe

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Scott Klement <klemscot@klements.com>
Reply-To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 10:16:44 -0500 (CDT)

>
Is this from your vast experience with FreeBSD, Joe?  And is it that
same experience where you decided that it runs "crap like Oracle" or
is "SQL-based".

Frankly, perhaps you should refrain from commenting on something that
you've never even tried to do!


On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Joe Pluta wrote:

> I'm not going to waste a lot of time on this, as it's all but pointless.  I
> did read your post.  The parts where you say Unix can outperform the AS/400
> as a LAN server are correct, the points where you say you can write business
> applications on it are not.  FreeBSD has no integrated database, uses crap
> like Oracle, and so will never work as a business logic server.
> 
> That's all I want to say.  Read whatever you want into it.  FreeBSD can
> never support a real enterprise-level business application and an AS/400 can
> (and no, Yahoo is not a real business application, it's a web application -
> different animal).  You like FreeBSD?  Great.  Use it.  Just don't compare
> it to OS/400.  They're different beasts.
> 
> Joe
> 
> 

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