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Found at: gopher.quux.org:70/Archives/usenet-a-news/FA.works/81.07.09_ucbvax.2192_fa.works.txt

Aucbvax.2192
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Thu Jul  9 06:09:48 1981
 Reliability
>From Joe.Newcomer@CMU-10A Thu Jul  9 06:06:06 1981
I have contended for several years that I don't need better languages,
compilers, or editors NEARLY as much as I need a database management
system.  Alas, the conventional DBMS is oriented to social security
records.  I once mentioned "well, you put all that on a database"
to someone and they immediately began to explain how they had
variable-length text which a database system "couldn't handle". 
Of course, a large class of uninteresting systems think in terms of
fixed-length records, but what we lose by ignoring them is that they
solve a whole lot of other problems.  I once worked in the "real
world" on a banking system, and it is a good way to learn to be
paranoid about hardware and software.  When you start playing with
millions of dollars of real bucks, and find that people audit their
checking accounts (and even interest on savings) to the nearest penny,
AND your company has posted a mongo amount of dollars in bond to back
up their promise that they WON'T screw up, you find that redundancy is
a way of life.  DBMS systems have all had to deal with this class of
problems; the fact that their image of the data is prehistoric does
not invalidate the other solutions.
>From a personal workstation viewpoint, the problem is to implement
the redundancy of state at a very low cost.  If my machine crashes,
I want to boot it and get the display looking just like it did
before the crash, having lost perhaps a few small edits, or the
mail message I was composing (if it was shorter than some low
threshold) or possibly the window I just the instant before had
brought up.  Doing this cheaply requires ingenuity.
				joe
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