Re: DDS Support

James,

At 6/29/00 01:17 AM -0700, you wrote:

>  My point is that just because it exists on "all" platforms doesn't
> mean that we should be forced to switch to it.  Where is the ROI?

The ROI is in the expanded availability of talent.  Now, as a business
owner, the capitalist pig that I can be, if I can gain in available
talent pool, I've gained.  The following may make some people
uncomfortable, but AS/400 talent is a niche skill.

>Now SQL skill may be foreign to the AS/400 community, but it is common knowledge in the

industry as a whole.  Therefore the adoption of SQL for the AS/400
brings in a larger talent pool, more competition, demand for improvement

 SQL on the /400 is not a complete implementation, i.e. I can't (easily) write a full-fledged system w/ any complexity w/ SQL only.  On other platforms / DB's you can. I find embedded SQL ugly, w/ very few advantages over native RPG I/O.  Not to mention the bad habit of the pre-compiler lagging behind by a release.

<snip>
I'm in camp #2, IBM or anybody that places a REFFLD capability in SQL
would have a following and force the remaining SQL providers to follow
suit. Ergo, a new standard.  DDS, in your wildest dreams, will -never-
become a standard.  And if you think that the AS/400, and it's
particular definition languages, will live forever, ask any person with
S/3x background to give you the timeline of the decline of OCL or IDDU
or WSU or #GSORT.

 Then I assume you're running as fast as possible from RPG and CL coding!  :-)  RPG is non-standard outside of the IBM Midrange.
 

The S/36 outsold the S/38 about 8 to 1, so why isn't OCL the AS/400
command language and IDDU the file definition language or WSU the method
to handle subfiles?  Personally, I liked being able to have // IF
statements condition the #GSORT specifications but I got around it by
writing my own dynamic QRYSLT string builder.

1)  WSU was dead to new development *long* before the AS/400 arrived on the scene.
2)  IDDU was too little, too late and never really took off, since it wasn't fully supported across the development tools.
3)  #GSORT is now called FMTDTA.
4)  OCL is still supported under the 36EE (and "sort of" under the M36).  IDDU and of course #GSORT are also supported.

 With very few exceptions, CL is far more powerful than OCL.  I don't see that major advancement w/ SQL.  I *do* see some major things missing or very difficult to do in SQL.

What happens when new data types are indroduced? Like "currancy" where
you can qualify it as US$, CN$, yen, sorry I don't have a euro symbol on
my keyboard.  How about a data type for quantity? So you can specify
pounds, tons, metric tons, stones, kilograms as a "format" just as we
specify dates as *ISO or *USA?  Let's not forget time duration, where
7:30 is 7 hours and 30 minutes and 7.50 is 7 and one half hours.

 As I mentioned in another post, this is a DB issue, not an SQL vs. DDS issue.

 -mark