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

Well, I disagree with your assertation for several reasons, but these two are 
the
biggest.

In a client/server environment (be it message based or shared memory, or any 
one of a
dozen other strategies...) you have moved processing logic into the client 
part, and that
part is just as likely to be in error as a server module that does the same 
logic. In other words,
moving the logic doesn't make it correct.

Secondly, even if *most* of the programs in a client/server environement would 
be
correct, either through an insensitivity to dates like you mention, or because 
of some
other reason, you don't *know* that until you *examine* them. In short, you 
haven't
really avoided any work, and in many cases, you have made it more difficult, 
since Client/Server
programs often escape the scrutiny given to host based programs in terms of 
standards and
testing.

There are several other reasons that could come into play, not the least of 
which is that several
systems were remediated with a windowing date system. That can cause havoc if 
you have to
do long term extensions. The business I work in routinely does 100 year time 
series projections,
and client/server fixes are much more difficult than pure server based fixes.

-Paul

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2001 3:38 PM
Subject: RE: ODBC (was RE: Green screen - it's time is over )


> > -----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
>
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