Re: New Era, VB, Delphi, PB

In article <32AC1AF7.671C@west.co.za>, "Mark D. Stock" <marks@west.co.za> writes > >Oh now here I agree. This is one of my pet topics when giving Informix >training. The development of both RDBMS's and OS's, in my view, is going >to cross paths somewhere in the not-to-distant future. As you say, if >you look at what an OS does and what a modern day DBMS does, they are far >too similiar. Modern UNIX now has checkpoints with fast recovery on system >failure, instead of fsck!! I certainly think Informix should look at this >area for future development. Perhaps we can get a job in R&D eh Tim? > Count me in as well. I seem to remember some talk I had a while back (in "Real Life" tm) which went along the lines of Informix's internal thread scheduler is a lot like an OS process scheduler. You already have part of the memory management code in that each thread has it's own tch (Thread Control Block) and stack. Also memory is allocated as internal pools and fragements / segments similar to UNIX sbrk/malloc malloc. onmode -F even frees unused memory so memory allocation/deallocation is taken care of. Disk I/O is handled by AIO/KAIO threads which when using raw disk are very close to the device driver for the disk. Why have an OS in the middle translating KAIO system calls to calls to the disk device driver? Define an API like OnBar does to backup devices and have the disk driver manufacturers write to that standard instead. Poll threads/listen threads handle part of network comms and internal mutexs/latches handle dealing with multiple processors. Hey - it's almost there!! All we need is something to boot it and direct links with device drivers and we can dump this dumb OS sheduler and really improve performance! -- David Williams