[dba-Tech] database

Hi Shamil:

It was good fortune that all the pieces fell into place at the right moment
and there was MS Access 1.1. It had a very small foot-print, considering it
had to perform on Windows which had a huge resource requirements.

I was currently doing much of my work in the new FoxPro. It had blown away
all the competition because it full compiled into a stand-alone application
and it had the new Rushmore sorting algorithm...it was the fastest by far.

When Microsoft bought up Foxpro, it was obvious what the systems people at
MS wanted; the patents on this incredible software break-through and the
technology was immediately put into Access version 2 and the rest is
history. I immediately started learning Access.

You must admit, for the desktop Windows computer the best small database
ever created was Access 7. It brought so much work to the company that I was
then working for. We went from a development team of one person, myself but
only part-time to seven full-time programmers. For the next two years it was
the most profitable section in the company...after leaving I continued
working on numerous government contracts and private sales....most FEs were
MS Access but the BE was abandoned in favour of MS SQL and Oracle.

In summary, the ten years from 1990 to 2000 saw more great PC databases come
and go. So you are saying maybe missing Dataflex was a good miss. 

Jim 

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Salakhetdinov
Shamil
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2013 2:08 PM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] database


Hi Jim --

<<<
Too bad I never had a chance to try it out.
>>>
AFAIU you mean DataFlex? (I suppose it wasn't a bad luck you haven't had a
chance to work with it.)
I have worked with DataFlex MS DOS within year 1993.
By that time DataFlex have had already used so called 4GL Object Oriented
proprietary programming language.
That was a kind of "Object Cobol" - resulting in a very verbose code.
Yes, it was a powerful OOP 4GL and development system, maybe too powerful to
be true for that time: when I switched to MS Access 1.1 because of my that
time main customer request - that was a shock as MS Access 1.1 was "object
based" and it (MS Access) doesn't have any features to create custom classes
etc.
DataFlex, I suppose, was too late with its Visual DataFlex version - and MS
Access "crushed" it and PowerBuilder, and Borland's Paradox and dBase, and
Clipper, and FoxBase... on MS Windows desktop platform.

DataFlex has a notion of Dataset - a set of related tables - datamodel
subset. That Dataset can be "bound" to UI and it is providing a very
powerful data manipulation operations - that was a unique(?) feature for
middle 90-ies of the last century and it's still rather unique I suppose.

DataFlex wasn't an MS SQL based DBMS - one would better think of it as
having Network Data Model ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_model ).

Thank you.

-- Shamil


Воскресенье, 27 января 2013, 11:51 -08:00 от "Jim Lawrence"
<accessd at shaw.ca>:
>Hi Stuart:
>
>That is impressive. Too bad I never had a chance to try it out.
>
>Those were the "Gold Rush" days of computers. The database and systems
>market was growing like crazy then. Anyone smart and willing to work hard
>could turn a really good buck...obviously you did.
>
>CPM, huh...first DOS, but was multi-user capabilities. If Microsoft had not
>been so struck on being different all their slashes could have been the
>right way, their system would have been multi-user and network ready.
Worked
>with CPM, on government managers' Kypros (the precursor of the laptop...it
>was as heavy and big as a PC but came with a suit-case handle so it was
>portable). If you know CPM well, then UNIX and now Linux would seem like
>home. 
>
>One of my contracts was working on an ancient accounting system for the
>government from 1992 to 2000. The database was called DC/2. (Interesting
>aside: the database was originally commissioned and then sold by a mortuary
>company out of Chicago...a good location for that type business...very high
>volumes.) Its language was like a macro assembler code; OP code, Operand
and
>value. Returns and loops were just offsets pushed into the local stack,
>followed but a return OP code. No real-time keys or indexes, those tasks
>were over-night batch files. The system had thousands of users and was the
>back-bone of two of the largest government ministries. We were on call
24x7.
>The system was originally on an IBM Mainframe, using a version of CPM, then
>it was migrated to a VAX, using VMS (the first modern virtual UNIX), then
it
>migrated to DataPoint on UNIX servers and finally to Linux servers. I
>understand that it has now been abandoned (R.I.P) and replaced by an Oracle
>DB with their PL/SQL language and their GUI FE but of course it is running
>on Linux. 
>
>Things sure move fast in the computer world. 
>
>Jim

<<< skipped >>>
>
_______________________________________________
dba-Tech mailing list
dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com
http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech
Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com