Compare the TPC-C (OLTP) or TPC-W (web e-commerce) benchmark numbers for the OODB's to those of the RDB's. Well... you can't. None of the OODB vendors have done those benchmarks. They know they would suck. Or maybe they just know that the RDB's have this market sown up, and can't justify the investment.
Whatever reason, if TP is at the heart of what you do (as it is for MANY systems), you don't want to use a DB whose vendor can't or won't do the industry standard benchmark.
The choice of programming language makes at most a 10% difference in results. And that is being generous. Its probably closer to 1%. The talent and experience of the programmer is all that matters, to a first approximation. A Master of Assembly Language will beat a drone in LISP any day.
The conclusion is that you should hire the best people, and use whatever kinky language turns them on.
What I think killed LISP is that many LISP programmers had the attitude that they wouldn't stoop to mere application programming, much of which has little technical thrill. What impresses me most about Viaweb is a bunch of LISP hackers willing to get their hands dirty and deliver value to the masses. Maybe those Founder's Shares helped.
Anyway it is heartening to see LISP succeed for whatever reason. It really is the best programming language. God is written in LISP.
when the act of debugging itself changes or masks the bug. The poster is refering to non-deterministic bugs, such as can easily happen when multithreading.
It is not that clear. Enterprise DB's require higher levels of support than almost any other class of software, and the customers are willing to pay for it. This matches up nicely with the strengths and business models of Open Source.
My personal experience with specialized databases in banking also leads me to believe that there is a vast unscratched itch for customisation of DB's, for both functionality and performance. A modular open source DB would be ideal for this.
According to my precise calculations...
on
Apocalypse Not
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· Score: 1
We spent about 100 times too much on Y2K.
First of all, the USA spent far more on Y2K than other countries. Europe spent less, Asia and Latin America spent even less. But there where no Y2K disasters even in the countires that spent little. Hence, we wasted a lot of money.
Secondly, as we all know, software testing is imperfect, and it is only reasonable to expect at least 1% of the bugs to slip through. The almost total absence of bugs indicates that the real number of bugs was actually very modest.
There is an explanation for Y2K spending that fits the data better: it was a field day for bureaucrats, lawyers, and hypesters. The US being in the leadership of all of these areas, we spent the most.
1. Sun Enterprise 10000 systems have single points of failure. You can't hot-swap CPU boards arbitrarily, and the Ultra-5 front-end is a critical component.
2. Sun recommends that for high availability you cluster between multiple 10000 systems. This is bad.
3. Microsoft's commodity hardware platforms do not offer any of the scalability or reliability features of the Enterprise 10000, so clustering is the only option. This is good.
4. Microsoft's current clustering offering is primitive. In a survey, a majority of people said it was adequate.
5. Microsoft promises that Windows 2000 will have better clustering than NT.
6. eBay is not following Sun's recomendations that high-availability requires multiple systems. They have experienced outages.
BTW, it is shocking to me that eBay could have only a single server. This is at best incredibly naive; at worst blatant incompetence. Therefore I suspect it is false.
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Compare the TPC-C (OLTP) or TPC-W (web e-commerce) benchmark numbers for the OODB's to those of the RDB's. Well... you can't. None of the OODB vendors have done those benchmarks. They know they would suck. Or maybe they just know that the RDB's have this market sown up, and can't justify the investment.
Whatever reason, if TP is at the heart of what you do (as it is for MANY systems), you don't want to use a DB whose vendor can't or won't do the industry standard benchmark.
The choice of programming language makes at most a 10% difference in results. And that is being generous. Its probably closer to 1%. The talent and experience of the programmer is all that matters, to a first approximation. A Master of Assembly Language will beat a drone in LISP any day.
The conclusion is that you should hire the best people, and use whatever kinky language turns them on.
What I think killed LISP is that many LISP programmers had the attitude that they wouldn't stoop to mere application programming, much of which has little technical thrill. What impresses me most about Viaweb is a bunch of LISP hackers willing to get their hands dirty and deliver value to the masses. Maybe those Founder's Shares helped.
Anyway it is heartening to see LISP succeed for whatever reason. It really is the best programming language. God is written in LISP.
when the act of debugging itself changes or masks the bug. The poster is refering to non-deterministic bugs, such as can easily happen when multithreading.
It is not that clear. Enterprise DB's require higher levels of support than almost any other class of software, and the customers are willing to pay for it. This matches up nicely with the strengths and business models of Open Source.
My personal experience with specialized databases in banking also leads me to believe that there is a vast unscratched itch for customisation of DB's, for both functionality and performance. A modular open source DB would be ideal for this.
We spent about 100 times too much on Y2K.
First of all, the USA spent far more on Y2K than other countries. Europe spent less, Asia and Latin America spent even less. But there where no Y2K disasters even in the countires that spent little. Hence, we wasted a lot of money.
Secondly, as we all know, software testing is imperfect, and it is only reasonable to expect at least 1% of the bugs to slip through. The almost total absence of bugs indicates that the real number of bugs was actually very modest.
There is an explanation for Y2K spending that fits the data better: it was a field day for bureaucrats, lawyers, and hypesters. The US being in the leadership of all of these areas, we spent the most.
Let me translate Microsoft's position:
1. Sun Enterprise 10000 systems have single points of failure. You can't hot-swap CPU boards arbitrarily, and the Ultra-5 front-end is a critical component.
2. Sun recommends that for high availability you cluster between multiple 10000 systems. This is bad.
3. Microsoft's commodity hardware platforms do not offer any of the scalability or reliability features of the Enterprise 10000, so clustering is the only option. This is good.
4. Microsoft's current clustering offering is primitive. In a survey, a majority of people said it was adequate.
5. Microsoft promises that Windows 2000 will have better clustering than NT.
6. eBay is not following Sun's recomendations that high-availability requires multiple systems. They have experienced outages.
BTW, it is shocking to me that eBay could have only a single server. This is at best incredibly naive; at worst blatant incompetence. Therefore I suspect it is false.