Re: ISQL forms on NT?

In <5g4get$9eu@cssun.mathcs.emory.edu> walt@wst.b30.ingr.com (Walter S. Tyszka) writes: >On 03/11/97 Nils Myklebust wrote: >Nils, >Perhaps you are missing another point here? A lot of graphics intensive >businesses are retiring their old UNIX systems in favor of newer, more >powerful, usually less expensive, Intel Pentium (or Pentium Pro) multi- >processor systems running Windows NT. I dont understand this statement. There are a variety of *nixes running on Intel platforms already, and in SCO's case, their hosted NT was reported to run faster than NT native on the same platform. There are a number of valid reasons to consider NT for some applications, but "newness", and "more powerful" are most certainly not among them. In addition, SMP and MPP are already well implemented on the *nixes (whether Intel or anything else), whilst NT has a lot of ground to cover before they can lay claim to the same performance and OS stability on these kinds of systems. >The primary focus of these companies >is not databases, or database applications, (which historically have been >well implemented on single processor multiuser system) but graphics (which >historically excel on a multiprocessor single user environment). Hmmm. There'll be some argument over this I'm sure, but SMP has been around for a long time now, certainly well before anyone except *nixes (and maybe Mac) had graphical applications. I would have said that DB applications was one of the driving forces behind the push to larger mutliprocessor machines, whilst graphical apps, have largely ridden on the back of the newer technology as they became more popular, and required a proportionally greater slice of CPU time. >fact that most of these graphics intensive applications make use of RDBMS >systems was not much of a problem in a UNIX environment, but is becoming a >real stumbling block in the Windows NT world. Lost me. >The end users are simply replacing older semi-proprietary UNIX systems with >newer "open" systems which they can purchase from a multitude of vendors. >Many end users ran an OSF/Motif X Windows "environment" on their UNIX >operating system - primarily in a "text within a window" or tty mode rather >than a pure GUI mode. Now they are migrating to a Microsoft Windows >"environment" on a Windows NT operating system (which looks very similar >to the OSF/Motif X Windows "environment" which they where used to). You say here that the trend towards "openness" has advantages, and you are correct. However, to associate "openness" with a single vendor, and to call all other offerings "semi-proprietary" flys in the face of logic. Using MS apps on MS backends with MS clients is hardly "open". It offers some compatability advantages in much the same way that the proprietary minis did (and still do). These were replaced in favour of the "openness" you [correctly] advocate, but a move from one sole supplier to another sole supplier, is no step forward IMHO. >The >graphics intensive applications which they run usually create their own >window to run in, or are full-screen windowless applications, and the user >might not care (or even know) which underlying OS is in use. >In a homogeneous environment of non-UNIX platforms it is wonderful to have >Informix ESQL/C, ODS, XPS, and IUS available; but it is a tragedy to loose >I-SQL, and I-4GL capabilities. Again, I think there's a paradox here. On one hand, you correctly state that underlying OSs should be invisible to the user base, meaning that real distributed applications are possible over a variety of *nixes, MS OSs, Netware, OS400, etc, etc. But then to praise the benefits of a "homogeneous environment of non-Unix platforms" [by which I assume you mean NT] is entirely contradictory. >The DBMS vendor which makes this migration from UNIX to Windows NT the least >painful to the end user will probably win the lion's share of the DBMS >software sales in this arena. Informix has done a tremendous job in porting >world class dataservers to this environment, but have done very little to >support their long time I-SQL, and I-4GL users. At last. We agree here :) Bryan Tonnet batonnet@zeta.org.au