RE: MySQL on System i

["Alan Campin" <Alan.Campin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<snip>
MAJOR RED FLAG!  If I am running enterprise business apps on my iSeries
in
PHP I would not want to reach out to another Wintel machine only to have
the
DB request come back to the iSeries' DB2 engine.  Almost like doing a
full
circle and adding a layer of failure at the same time!  I am near
certain
this isn't how it will work in the end, but wanted to comment on your
theory.
</snip>

As I understand it, this is not what they would do. The iSeries will be
a Certified Storage Engine just like of their other engines so if you
have a PC based application running, it would go to the iSeries for the
database functions just like you go to Oracle or SQL Server. 

As other have said, you could have the application running in the PASE
also but I would suspicion that not many vendors would go for this idea.
They would want to run their applications from their PC machines but be
able to use the iSeries as the storage engine allowing their programming
staffs to access the data from the iSeries side as well.  

As far as accessing legacy iSeries data from the MySQL, I think the
chances of that working are pretty slim. Most Iseries data is completely
un-normalized. Try to access it through SQL is a nightmare. I work with
Mapics and one of the nice things is that mostly it is pretty normal but
it is the first in 20 years on the machine that I seen anything that is
even semi-normal. The only thing I have seen is stuff that I have done
and I have gone back and found out that the programmers where
de-normalizing the database because they didn't want to have to do a
join (True story). 

Hopefully, if iSeries is the database, you will be able to call Stored
Procedures with high performance. That would allow you to access the
iSeries un-normalized data. 

MySQL now has it's own SQL stored procedure language with the same
syntax as IBM's SQL 2003 but that still requires that SQL be run against
the database and if the database is abnormal that is going nowhere fast.