Re: Big System... Is Oracle Forms Good?

At 08:15 PM 2/5/95 +1100, Peter Harris wrote: >#include <disclaimer.h> > >John, >With a thousand plus users you are in the realms of needing a T.P >monitor. This technology is as old as the hills - ask any IBM mainframe > Yes, I know this has been true in the past. I am no stranger to TP monitors, having written two myself and having worked under the oldest of them all - ACP (now called TPF). I am well aware of all the theory in this field having worked in OLTP for over 20 years. But I am at this point trying to find specifics, as I am up against people who claim that Oracle forms will work just fine with 1000 or more users. Since I have seen it work in one case in Europe with many hundreds of users (on a project that came in many tens of millions of dollars over budget and over a year late), I am aware to some extent of the hazards and prospects, but am looking for more detail. The problem today is that SMP machines are getting extremely fast. We have deployed systems on machines with over 1000 MIPS and 1GB of RAM that were still not even classed as mainframes. Furthermore, the latest Oracle does a form of internal transaction processing... they use a threaded server so they no longer have a process-per-terminal, and this does indeed pick up one of the benefits of OLTP - it minimizes the number of processes competing (in a shared memory environment with many CPU's) for common resources such as memory latches. This has been a problem in the past because this competition leads to highly nonlinear scaling. Also, the use of stored procedures allows one to put a significant amount of logic within the database engine... again an advantage over either the old database approach, or even (in some cases) the OLTP approach (which must still deal with IPC overhead between the TP processes and the DB engine). So I can see why it might work. What I'd like to know is specific experience with recent version as to why it won't, or specific arguments against this more modern architecture (the RDBMS vendors have only been deploying these multithreaded OLTP-like servers for a few years). Also, since I communicated with you last I skimmed the programming guide for Oracle PL/SQL and found it to be an apparently adequate procedural language for implementing common business logic. But my 30 years of computing experience tells me that there are always gotchas... sometimes fatal gotchas... that don't show in the manual. Thanks for your time. If you have any more arguments I can use, I would love to hear them, as I am on the anti-Forms side of an architectural debate! John