The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
joa...@swbell.net (John McKown) writes: > I think that there is a difference between having a "normal" (ain't no > such beastie) application programmer and an "old style" sysprog. I think > sysprogs need HLASM. I am not convinced that it is necessary for > applications people to really know HLASM or even z architecture. Today's > COBOL is much better than in the past. I can see needing the speed of > assembler in "embedded" type applications. But that is not z/OS's forte. > Commercial programming and COBOL go together like pancakes and maple > syrup. But other languages are coming up for the "webified" world. I > like PHP. PHP using DB2 with perhaps some COBOL stored programs is, IMO, > likely one of the best ways to talk via the web. But others may > reasonable disagree. there was the period in the 90s ... when various parts of the financial industry spent billions on re-engineering for "straight through processing" as part of eliminating the overnight batch window. there were spectacular failures ... tainting "re-engineering" efforts for years to come. they tended to use "new" technologies that were known to have some increased overhead (compared to the batch cobol) ... but thot it could be compensated for by using parallelism with large numbers of "killer micros". the problem was that there was lots of hand-waving about the increased overhead ... but not actually quantified. when the efforts started to be deployed and the factor turned out to be one hundred times ... the efforts went down in flames. the factor of one hundred ... totally swamping any offsetting benefits of using large number of "killer micros". recently there have been some new re-engineering with approaches that use high-level specification that is translated into lots of SQL. rather than relying on large number of application programmers, each trying to invent their own optimized parallelism methodology ... it relies on the significant parallelism optimization investments that have gone into major RDBMS. Part of this plays out in how much investment different vendors are pouring into RDBMS parallelism ... aka recent item Larry Ellison's IBM-Slayer Is Oracle Exadata Machine http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225701468 and from last year DB2 announces technology that trumps Oracle RAC and Exadata http://freedb2.com/2009/10/10/for-databases-size-does-matter/ IBM pureScale Technology Redefines Transaction Processing Economics. New DB2 Feature Sets the Bar for System Performance on More than 100 IBM Power Systems http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28593.wss mentioned in these posts: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#43 From The Annals of Release No Software Before Its Time http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009p.html#46 From The Annals of Release No Software Before Its Time ... and past posts mentioning original relational/SQL System/R implementation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#systemr other posts in other parts of this thread: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#81 Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#82 Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: Delete all members of a PDS that is allocated http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010j.html#83 Percentage of code executed that is user written was Re: De -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
