🚀 go-pugleaf

The following 3.5 paragraphs are taken from the introduction to chapter #14
(Oracle-RDB). Publication of this teaser was authorized by the author,
Roland Hughes.

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RDB is quite simply the best relational database ever released on the
OpenVMS platform. This database was originally created by Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) back in the 1980's. It was at least a decade, if not
multiple decades, ahead of its time. The database is now owned by Oracle
Corporation but is still the premier fault tolerant cluster aware database.
RDB stands for Relational Data Base. DEC continued its tradition of plain
names when it created this product.

When RDB first came out, it was so far ahead of its time that it eclipsed
the hardware of its day. The old VAX boxes with RA series drives simply
didn't have enough horsepower to run the thing well. The I/O speed of the RA
series disks was slow by just about everybody's standards. They were built
to be reliable, not fast. People don't think much about hard drives these
days. The technology has improved to the point that we tend to upgrade long
before the failure occurs. Back in the day when RA series disk drives
reigned, a five year MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) was a lofty goal.

Security is one of the many selling points for RDB. It uses OpenVMS built-in
security including accounts and ACL rights identifiers. There is no
secondary maintenance issue about setting up user accounts inside the
database. You can assign ACL security at both the database and table level.

RDB offers complete integration with CDD. When you create a database with
the DICTIONARY IS REQUIRED clause all entries created or altered in the
database are automatically kept in sync with the CDD. Having this level of
integeration >>> [58 pages follow]

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Once you read the text and try out the examples of chapter #13 (MySQL) and
chapter #14 (RDB) you will have a really good feeling for the pros and cons
of these two products. This is just the book I needed since one of my legacy
OpenVMS systems currently contains 100+ RMS index files and we were
exploring relational database alternatives. Click the following link to
order the book.

http://www.islandco.com/theminimum.html

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/cool_openvms.html
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/openvms_demos.html
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/cool_openvms.html#TMYNTKTBA-OpenVMS-AD