RE: ODBC (was RE: Green screen - it's time is over )

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Raulerson
>
> MM- Well, I have been following this and *I* don't get your point either.
> If I understand it correctly, you are saying that 85% of all
> programs would not have
> needed Y2K remdiation if they had been "server based."
>
> I find this rather ludicrious, as the greatest majority of
> programs I know of that that
> did need remeditation were server based - based in fact on very
> "server centric" hosts.
> Including OS/390, OS/400, UNIX, and others.

I said message-based client/server, not "server based".  And for that
architecture, my statement is absolutely true.  Let's look at the situation:
in a message-based client/server architecture, the client program (such as
an inquiry or a print report) requests data from a server.  The client fills
in some fields in a data structure, sends it to a server, then receives data
one message at a time back from the server.  In the simplest case, each
message corresponds to a record in the file being queried.

Prior to Y2K, the dates in those messages would have been six-digit dates.
And that would have matched the way they were stored in the file.  Now for
Y2K, we expand the dates in the file, but we DO NOT EXPAND the dates in the
message.  When the server returns the message to the client, it simply moves
in only the YYMMDD portion of the date.

So let's take a print program as an example.  Most print programs did no
date calculations; they simply read data in a specific order and printed it
out.  If they had used a server program to retrieve the data, the server
would have returned the data in the correct order.  Even though the data on
the record was eigth digits, the dates in the messages returned to the
client would have had six digits.  The programs would have done their
YYMMDD->MMDDYY comversion, and printed them with the appropriate separators,
and the reports would have looked perfectly normal.

Without a single line of code in the report program changing.

Does this make sense?

Joe Pluta
www.plutabrothers.com