Posts by Philip Howard

Australia to spend a billion bucks and seven years on SAP project

Model 204 clarification

Bonkers! But that's government for you.

For those of you wondering about Model 204. First. the article is wrong: it's not an IBM product. It never was an IBM product. It just happens to run on mainframes. Actually, back around 1990 it was pretty cool. It was the first database to use bit-mapped indexes, more that a decade before they were implemented in Sybase IQ (I had to correct a Sybase spokesperson who claimed that IQ was the first database using bit maps). Model 204 was originally developed by CCA and is now owned by Rocket Software. Rocket, incidentally, owns and supports lots of moribund products. It vows never to cease supporting a product until the last user turns it off.

As US$12bn is wiped off Apple's value in one day, iOS 9, OS X 10.11 and Watch OS 2 dates set

Re: New rule...

Ah, but did Apple's poor performance cause the slide in the NASDAQ or was it vice versa? Which is the cause and which is the effect?

Actian daubs go-faster stripes on cheapo database kit

Benchmark

Note that the benchmark says "non-clustered". If you look at the TPC-H benchmarks website you'll see that Exasol beats the pants off Actian (and everybody else who bothers to benchmark - most don't) but it's clustered so that doesn't count?! In any case, these sorts of benchmarks have little real-life value.

Dial 'M' for Microsoft's new programming language

What goes around

I thought M was the follow-on from MUMPS?

Mind your languages with Microsoft LINQ

Impedance mismatch

Impedance mismatch is not between program and database but between an object oriented construct and its relational equivalent, and vice versa. The idea is that there is an overhead involved in mapping from one to the other that one would like to minimise. Intersystems talk about impedance mismatch a lot (because they're good it at reducing it) so you might want to try their web site.