Posts by Larry D

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

Postgres, TiDB etcetera are eating SQLServer alive in the corporate space. I think MS have given up.

Microsoft builds open source document database on PostgreSQL, suggests FerretDB as front end

Re: We screwed up...

You can export onenote to .mht files which is basically HTML. Even the corporate version.

Yes OneNote can be chaotic, particularly when using the mobile version where the app is sub optimal for organising, but at least it's searchable.

At a new site I dump all my learnings about the site in to my own OneNote. Then people complain I have this resource and why can't I put it into their terribly organised formats (OneNote or whatever). Don't blame OneNote for messy minds.

Is SQLServer abandonware? Probably. I know corporates moving to Postgres or whatever when SQLServer hits scalability limits. Does Microsoft's Linkedin use SQLServer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DgU8T69VRo&t=13s

BMC's $1.6B victory over IBM is TKO on appeal

Contract with the devil

My understanding is that IBM GS (now Kyndryl) had a global contract with BMC so their outsourced customers could use BMC products. Typically the BMC products can do more, more efficiently. Sometimes the products are just are just equivalents, like BMC Control-M vs IBM OPC/TWS, in which case having the license arrangement allowed customers to outsource operations to IBM/Kyndryl without having to convert all their Control-M stuff to TWS. Now IBM and Kyndryl have separated this has become contested ground. We have moved from IBM/Kyndryl to another outsourcer (worse than Kyndryl if you can imagine) and IBM are now continually trying to get us to convert from BMC, normally willfully ignoring the complexity and downsides. Our dingbat MGMT entertain these approaches. Just seems like BAU to me.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

I remember OS2 1.3 EE which included DBM - an early version of Db2/2. When IBM came to port that to NT it ran faster so they held off as faster on NT than OS/2 was not allowed. Turns out the OS/2 file system HPFS had a bug that Microsoft fixed in NTFS. So IBM held back releasing a version for NT until OS/2 HPFS was fixed. By then IBM had lost both the OS and the database war.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

I remember optimising the Oracle CPU and seat licensing at one site by moving apps around and getting rigorous with offboarding userids of people that left. A fair bit of work but it paid off. Next thing I know Oracle then ring our switch who put them through to me. "Can we change the licensing model?" I played dumb like I was cleaning staff.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Large Oz Government Department with large Amdahl mainframes. Water cooled. Being government they took the cheapest quote for the water cooling system maintenance. The company that got won the quote, still in business I see, found they could keep costs low by not doing any maintenance at all. So filters not regularly changed per spec. Eventually the pipes clog and freeze then burst spraying water directly at the side of one the Amdahls, which kept on working fine but was powered down before the water went above the false floor. No come back on any party...

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

enshittification

I think most sites stopped (ground to a halt) at 6.5 and didn't go on. I was told the interface for Notes mail was based on snail mail interactions. It dated badly. But it was good in 1994. One of our team swapped a whole lot of problem/change/incident/bug forms and workflow to in return for free licenses. These turned up in the next release of the base Notes product. He later moved to the UK and won Dragon's Den.

It was terrible in 2008. I remember being told by my Notes administrator not to send invites from gmail as it crashed Domino mail. I don't miss it although the forms, workflow and (non-relational) databases could be good - at times. I'm continually amazed at how bad vendors get forms and workflow even today. IBM and Oracle both had OK products at various times that fell victim to enshittification.

MS tries to do forms/workflow in Sharepoint/Teams but it is really rubbish - really embarrassingly bad stuff you would not pay for. But corporates do.

I recently got a new personal laptop and wondered what was eating my network bandwidth. It was MS Teams chewing bandwidth even though I was not using it. So uninstalled Teams on my personal laptop but forced to use it at corporate work.

IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software

Who ported CICS to AIX?

In 1995 I installed and configured CICS/6000 on AIX (not my normal DBA job but they had no one else who could spell CICS available). My impression was that the CICS port was written by MicroFocus. I seem to recall Microfocus copyright notices coming up with the IBM ones. Maybe I'm wrong but this case is a little weird to me.