Amen. Allow me to add that often the decision to replace an MV database with
an RDBMS hinges on, "what do you mean I need 5 times as much
hardware/horsepower to run Oracle?".
"Our greatest duty in this life is to help others. And please, if you can't
help them, could you at least not hurt them?" - H.H. the Dalai Lama
"When buying & selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be
bought & sold are the legislators" - P.J. O'Rourke
Dan Fitzgerald
From: Timothy Snyder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org
To: u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org
Subject: RE: [U2] OPEN vs TRANS
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 17:21:28 -0400
"Allen E. Elwood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 10/07/2005 12:53:47 PM:
> The way I look at it, when I started programming 30 years ago systems
were
> millions of times slower, and in another 30 years they'll be so stinking
> fast that coding for speed will go the way of the Suchomimus and the
> Iguanodon!
As long as programmers think that way, their employers will continue to
pay people like me big bucks to come in and make the code more efficient.
;-) Sometimes more powerful systems can make bottlenecks more prominent.
Today's systems are expected to process more data in a shorter time, and
to provide more functionality than in days of yore, so even minor
inefficiencies are encountered over and over again. IMHO, there will
always be room for efficient coding techniques. Some folks claim you have
to sacrifice maintainability and readability for the sake of efficiency -
I've rarely found that to be true. As long as you care about and consider
both performance and maintainability as you develop code, it all just
falls together.
Now, as to people who want to code one line instead of two (e.g.: the
topic of this thread), I say take a touch typing course so you don't mind
a few extra keystrokes. (I've always been amazed watching seasoned
professionals using only one finger on each hand to write programs.) I
would much rather inherit a program that does its own opens and reads
instead of doing translates. Sooner or later somebody will want to get a
second field from the record and you'll be faced with doing two translates
or changing it to the way it should have been done in the first place.
Plus, the OCONV with a translate isn't nearly as obvious to the casual
observer of the code. Of course, you could put in some comments to make
it clear, but those keystrokes could have been spent opening the file at
the top of the program.
Tim Snyder
Consulting I/T Specialist , U2 Professional Services
North American Lab Services
DB2 Information Management, IBM Software Group
717-545-6403
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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