A Note to our esteemed readers:
As you might have noticed, IDMS/SQL stopped active publication a few years ago. Now and then small notes appeared. Most clients have moved away from mainframe and IDMS. Though the original reasons for staying away from IDMS was (in 1990...) was related to 'relational' , client-server etc, in the end the real reasons which eventually removed the product from many places happened to be quite different - Web, Java, GUI interfaces etc.
Here we summarize some of the items which appeared on the front page in the last 3-4 years on IDMS/SQL Web Page.
IDMSDC - 110 days non-stop - crosses 100 million transactions
(as reported in March 2006) An IDMS DB/DC Partition has been up and running 110 days non-stop... spanning over the new year with no problems. The data speaks for itself. (as on 10th March 2006). Even after all these years of wonderful systems on S/370, Unix and Windows, one seldom sees a parallel to this one! No systems on this particular mainframe stays on (nonstop) not even a week! Modern systems run out of storage... A simple html page (local, not even the real web) with a lot of JPG images can break your PC storage even now! My word crashes for lesser reasons!
DCMT D TIME
CURRENT TIME 08:36:30.77
CURRENT DATE 06/069 <----
STARTUP TIME 23:47:00.52
STARTUP DATE 05/324 <----
RUNAWAY INTV 00020
STALL INTV 00120
QUIESCE WAIT STALL INTERVAL
TIMER INTV 00001
DCMT D ACT TAS
Current max tasks 65
Times at max tasks 710
Allocated DCE/TCE 65
Number of tasks abended 4759
Number of tasks processed 100292369 <----
Number of tasks active 21
Also many counters on DCMT D STA SYS and DCMT D ACT REENT PRO have overflown and started from 0 again. Though these figures are not correct anymore, it is a great thing that the system survived all those 'zeroings'!
On behalf of IDMS/SQL, C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S!
Some Fresh Air for a Change!
- 15 September 2005
This week one of our well-wishers happened to attend a high-profile Java Conference in Europe (>1500 attendees). One of the presentations was on how to apply AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) and JMX (Java Management Extensions) patterns while instrumenting your application for management, an issue related to distributed system management on Unix, Windows and Linux platforms. And the presenter talked about the normal lifetime of a software application now (5 or if you are very lucky 10 years) and went on to say "However I talked to one of the participants who mentioned an application clocking 1 million transactions/day still alive after more than 20 years in production. And the system is running on IDMS from Cullinet Software! No memory leaks!! No connection pool blockage!!!"
A couple of years back, DB2 Magazine had surprsingly mentioned IDMS as a database still in production at many sites.
This being the case, it is a pity that IDMS's own customers (and the vendor) are moving away from the database, eventhough all the front-ends (Java based, Application Server, Web etc) are all possible against IDMS today which can still outperform any other database in the market!
HP OpenView HP Ranked No. 1 in worldwide market share for distributed system management software
Linux - A Disappointing Experience!
One of the oldtime contributers- Manoo Tigè - sent this dispatch - Editor/IDMSSQL news, 20th July 2005
I installed my first Linux more than five years ago. That was a SuSE Linux V 6.3. I bought one for about 50 dollars. With no ADSL etc downloading was not economical those days. Also being a novice, I wanted a paper manual. And the 480 page well-printed manual was worth the price. This was real manual, not one of those 'Bibles' or 'in 21 days' stuff. This worked alright. Mostly I played with that. Soon one of my friends came and suggested RedHat 7.1 and we switched over to that. This too worked alright. KDE (K desktop) was superb. Again mainly used for playing games. But soon usage came down... Eventually the Linux disk (20 G) was reformatted to make room for my Windows needs. Now 5 years have passed. With millions of copies running in production, I assumed Linux must be a mature product now. Now comes the surprise. There is no longer free RedHat Linux. V 9 was the last one and that too not available anymore. In 2003, Red Hat abandoned its GNU Public License (GPL) version of Red Hat Linux in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Instead Red Hat launched Fedora Project (~ free Linux like olden days). Now Fedora is in its 4th iteration. This should be alright. Afterall only the name is different. Fedora is RedHat 9.x in reality. I downloaded and installed the product today. ... The result was disappointing. Here are a few things (more in an article later)
- Install without disturbing XP was not that simple... The documentation was not accurate enough... A lot of internet searching was required to get the right doc out of tons of garbage on the net. Then some manual work was required to get it running. Without my old experience with SuSE and RedHat 7.1, I would not have made it!
- Installation had a lot of fancy stuff, like choosing the install language from Chinese and Vietnamese to about 30 Indo-European tongues. Even the English technical buzzwords didn't make sense... How are these languages going to be better?
- Internet. The product comes with Konqueror browser (not Netscape anymore) Newspapers in non-Roman scripts did not work. In Explorer, today they all worked with dynamic fonts. I thought Internet was an important part of one's everyday PC use? How does one install fonts on Linux?
- I tried to play MP3 . Failed!!! Then downloaded RealPlayer from the net. It came as a binary file to be executed to install the thing. But execution of the bin failed. Then tried an ordinary CD track. This worked. Then a VCD/DVD, failed again. Are these not common stuff nowadays? One can make these working with Windows 95/98 easily even today!
- Started Eclipse (Java Dev). The whole thing hanged!!! Had to poweroff the PC.
- Started the Office product (Sun).. Was very slow... (Not surprising. A couple of years back, Sun bought a Java tool called Forte and that hanged my PC those days. This product had a reincarnation in another name later.) To write a document in 4 fonts I could as well run a Professional Write from my diskette!
- Recall that old RedHat 7.1 was recommending at least 16M RAM (32 recommended) and 900 M harddisk. Well, today my PC had 256 M RAM and 40 G Harddisk. Fedora base was about 3 Giga. Still something one could do with an old 386, is still slow...
- At last I wanted to shutdown the pC. Well, shutdown prompt is nowhere to be seen under GNOME. I tried everywhere... icons, menus etc. Finally found on the net that they (Fedora release 4) missed SHUTDOWN !!! There is a patch available.
It was a total disappointment that the system
failed/slow/difficult to use in the most common
operations of today. It is high time that a base set of
features is very very STABLE by now... but that is too
much to expect....from such a dynamic product...
Almost 15 years ago, I happen to use a Unix-like
operating system COHERENT installed from just 4
diskettes. Though only command level, this was a superb
product. COHERENT went out of business, after the free
Linux conquered the market. (To be continued...)
PS: Google has a lot of comments against Fedora's flop.
| Brock
Shaw passes away
Brock has been a staunch supporter of the IUA and in fact of IDMS in general for many years, and in that time he has made many friends all over the world. Brock has been a good friend of IDMS Users in Scandinavia and has addressed various gatherings especially in Finland and Norway. He will be sadly missed. On behalf of IDMS/SQL and IDMS Community in Scandinavia, we all wish his family - Rebecca and the two children - well and all our thoughts go to them. |
It is with very great sadness we
learnt that Brock Shaw passed away on 21st June
2005. Brock was born in Australia and went to the
USA in 1970 where he became involved with IDMS in
1973 while working for Sperry Univac in Blue
Bell, Pennsylvania. He joined Cullinane
Corporation in 1976 as field technical support in
Atlanta, Georgia, providing IDMS support and
training throughout the US for release 3.2 and
on. In 1984 he moved to the UK where he worked
for Cullinet until May, 1989, when he left to
become an independent contractor. He was a member
and officer of the UKIUA, IUA and EIUA. Given a
choice he would have prefered to work for
Cullinane Corporation!IBM sells PC Division to Lenovo - 8th Dec 2004
finally IBM is
leaving the PC market! Today (8th Dec 2004) Chinese firm
Lenovo bought the IBM PC Division for $1.25 billion.
With low margins and no software of its own (Lotus etc are a failure), IBM was making no money with its PC division.
IDMS/SQL has long maintained a view that IBM made stragetic mistakes in several areas - PC one of them. DB2 was the other big blunder. DB2 only helped to kill the mainframe market... Oracle and other simple SQL databases on the Unix/Windows were the biggest beneficiary. IDMS/SQL always opposed conversion from IDMS to DB2. In certain cases where customer had gone for such solutions, in the end they all landed up in Oracle's pocket. Most of these applications never supported a proper OLTP.
Another area is the Java based 'serious' application development. Not long ago IBM withdrew their Visual Age Java Tool. Now the flagship is an ailing Websphere. Then there is the free Eclipse (IBM is behind this too). But the market here is taken by Weblogic...... and free products like JBoss..
With all these 'fantastic technologies' the in-house application development has almost come to a standstill. The failure was covered up by many companies by outsourcing the EDP division first to a local service bureau..Eventually the software development itself is outsourced - again first locally to some big consulting companies and then abroad!! This is the eventual SUCCESS of the new technology!! Does anyone know now how to make an input/output interactive application which can cleanly update a database??? No matter what the platform is!!!
JavaClient
at IUA Workshop