🚀 go-pugleaf

.As to this I have good news! DBMSes and 4GLs are often (anectodal but
.frequent evidence) impressively *faster* than any ad-hoc program that
.does the same. NOTE: *the same*, not similar but much much simpler.
.
.If you are manipulating large masses of data in complicated ways, which
.is most people want to do, a well written DBMS is going to be way ahead
.of any well written lower level solution. Notice that you *can* for a
.very important problem outrun a well written DBMS with diabolically well
.written low level code, but this is a rare case.
.
.The same applies for example to sort utilities -- normally it takes a
.lot of effort to beat a well written generic sort utility on any system
.I know of.

This sure doesn't my experience.  My experience is that custom written
code can take a problem that takes 10-20hrs. to solve and change it into
a 10-20 minute problem.  In other words the custom written code is
what allows the solution to actually be used.

I'm not saying that Oracle or whatever isn't a very useful tool just that
there is a whole host of problems that it can't solve.  Many of these 
problems are relatively easy to hand-code using well known algorithms.
(well known means published in CACM or something similar).




-- 
David Caswell                             dbc%bushido.uucp@umich.edu