Re: ibm earnings report

On 17-Jul-08, at 8:49 PM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

THE ENTIRE IMPLEMENTATION of SQL on the AS400 smacks of incompetence
and I believe it was not ROCHESTER that was responsible, but rather the
influence of the 'big-iron' in TORONTO.
(rant rant rant) apologies

First of all I don't agree with Nathan's "incompetence" remark - I have had many issues - particularly with the pre-compiler but "incompetent"? Anyway there are two things fundamentally wrong with this particular argument ...

First, you can't hang this one on Toronto. DB/2 for the i is a home grown Rochester product and that in part was why it lagged behind the other DB/2 implementations for so many years. They could not take advantage of the DB/2 Universal code base for enhancements to SQL. I believe that these days they may be able to pick up some of the DB/2 code from Toronto but that is a relatively recent thing.

Second, the "big-iron" influence was mostly felt in Santa Teresa (or Silicone Valley lab as I think they call it now). Toronto was never a big mainframe shop - although their major sources of revenue were from mainframe (IMS/DB?) and AS/400. They parleyed that revenue into developing DB/2 for AIX and Windoze - and those (particularly SQL Server) were much bigger influences than the big iron. They were probably doing the right thing architecturally speaking - at least MS appear to have thought so or they wouldn't have hired away the chief architect (Jamie Hamilton - husband of Jennifer for those who recall her RPG/400 days).

Not that Toronto Lab (under the Software Group and lately Rational) haven't done some monumentally dumb things related to "i" - but let's at least criticize them for what they _have_ done!

Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com