Re: A glimpse into the history of Db2

It seems this is an example of a Grand Principle of Software Development
that is rattling around these days in my skull as I look back over 35 years
in this racket.

The principle: *All Your Plans, Intents, and Methodologies Are Dust In The
Wind.*

Or, as Bokonon put it in one of his Calypsos in Kurt Vonnegut's *Cat's
Cradle*:

*We do what we must, do what we must, do what we must,*
*Until we bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.*

What works, works.

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 11:43 AM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Matt Olson <Matt.Olson@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

With programming budgets stretched thin, I am betting they wish they

took the approach back then that Microsoft took with SQL Server 2017 which
now runs under Linux using a single code base.

I don't think so. One of the main takeaways of the IBM article is that
they *did* consider consolidating to a single code-base very
seriously, and the idea came up frequently within IBM. Moreover, I
don't think anyone could reasonably argue that IBM is somehow not a
leader in virtualization technology. If anyone could pull it off,
especially back in those days, surely it would be IBM.

The unique features of IBM's (radically!) disparate platforms and the
level of optimization between the database and those respective
platforms is what created and deepened the commitment to multiple code
bases. It's extremely likely that a single code base, if even feasible
at all, would have resulted in a significantly worse-performing
database for all the platforms. And most likely the biggest
performance hits would have been suffered by IBM's biggest
moneymakers.

Look at it this way: How long has IBM offered Db2 (previously DB2) for
LUW? And Microsoft only just introduced SQL Server "for LUW" in
mid-2017? (Note: I don't mean that as a bash against Microsoft in any
way, because they have their own technical and business reasons for
doing what they do, when they do it. I am just pointing out the
historical timeline.)

John Y.
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