On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 8:01 PM, D. Richard Hipp <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Feb 23, 2009, at 3:54 PM, P Kishor wrote: > >> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 2:46 PM, D. Richard Hipp <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >> .. >>> >>> SQLite is, in fact, a TCL extension that escaped into the wild. It >>> is >>> specifically designed to integrate well with Tcl/Tk. >>> >> .. >> >> Did you ever tell that story anywhere? Would be fun to read it. > > The story goes like this: I was working on a big Tcl/Tk+C app. (The > problem to be solved was interesting in its own right. It turned out > to be NP complete - equivalent to subgraph homomorphism. But the > customer wasn't interested in "why not" - they just wanted a > solution. We found some good heuristics, but that is another > story...) The application was highly graphical (made extensive use of > the Tcl/Tk canvas widget) and had to run on legacy hardware. HPUX. C > code to do the heavy computation. Tcl/Tk for control and display. > Data from an Informix database. Worked really well. > > But.... Every so often the operators would power-cycle the HPUX > machine. And when this happened, the Informix database server would > not reboot successfully all the time. When it did not, and the > operators double-clicked on my application, it (obviously) failed with > a message: "Cannot connect to database server". This was not my > fault. But because my application painted the error dialog, I'm the > one who had to take the support call. Not a good situation. > > So I thought.... what if there was a database engine that would read > and write directly to the disk without going through a server. Then > if the machine was healthy enough to bring up X11, I'd never have > problems accessing the database. SQLite 1.0 was born shortly > thereafter. > >
Richard, This is fascinating. This may not be the best place for expanding on this (on the other hand, this may be as good a place as any), but a few questions arise -- 1. Unless you don't want to, (or *that* client doesn't want to), it would be interesting to know who was that you were working for. 2. What was the big Tcl/Tk and C app? 3. When was this happening? 4. Weren't there any existing solutions that you considered? 5. When did sqlite actually acquire traction in the open source community? Shucks, this should go on the sqlite.org/history page. Thanks for the above insight though. Even this much is great to know. -- Puneet Kishor _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list [email protected] http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
