Comments on: The Cloud Outgrows Linux, And Sparks A New Operating System

By: Frank Wilhoit

Frank Wilhoit — Mon, 27 May 2024 21:01:13 +0000

Michael Stonebraker, of all people, is an *adjunct*? (Look him up, he’s done a Hell of a lot more than this article troubles to mention.)

By: hwertz

hwertz — Mon, 13 May 2024 16:35:13 +0000

Fascinating. I am glad this kind of thing is being looked into. Using a Linux kernel to provide hardware support etc. is practical, and looking for better ways to have a coherent large scale system is great. Indeed, my fairly lowly desktop has 500,000x the RAM. over 20.000.000x the storage (admittedly 20TB of disk storage is a bit higher than average) and 100,000s of times the cpu power of the 8 bit Ataris I started out on. But also over 10.000x the ram. cpu power. and about 500,000x the storage of the first Linux pc (a 16mhz 386) that i had. things have scaled “ok” but really i’m glad these things are being looked into for when it doesn’t.

By: Timothy Prickett Morgan

Timothy Prickett Morgan — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 12:34:25 +0000

In reply to ema tissani.

Hey! Fun to see you over here…

I agree with the idea that I don’t ever want to think of the file system. That’s why Google created Spanner. And its developers just don’t care. They dump data into this infinite storage and it is a database or a file system or whatever they need and it just works.

By: ema tissani

ema tissani — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 12:24:48 +0000

Well… the relational algebra model is a powerful way to represent (and, apparently, to conveniently also store) information. Glad it was realized. IMHO the hierarchical file system model should have never be made accessible to end users. It’s too low level, too limiting to express user intentions, doesn’t belong to the user layer (we have it because it was economic and convenient in the first personal computers also to store OS info, then we adapted to it).
The amount of wasted energy of current “unix style” system just use to parse strings again and again to locate data is absurd, even in configuration files, systems of course natively lacking a DB.
IBMi model is teaching us something.
And, I dare to say, if one wanted it, IBMi should be the easiest system to distribute horizontally and running microservices and message passing style of computing, while keeping observability and debugging.

By: Anthony Youngman

Anthony Youngman — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 22:25:28 +0000

In reply to Eric Means.

I doubt Rocket is looking at it legally. What would they sue over? A patent lasts, what, twenty years? Pick is over twice that age.

If you want to run Pick, would a clone do? ScarletDME is GPL, and written by a guy who I believe was on the team that wrote/maintained Pr1me INFORMATION. Okay, it’s linux only, but you can run it in a VM …

Cheers,
Wol

By: Rufus Barrington

Rufus Barrington — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 21:39:52 +0000

In reply to David Apimerika. The wheel has been reinvented. Both pick and mumps were doing this in the 60s

By: David Apimerika

David Apimerika — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 18:23:54 +0000

In reply to David Wagner. Yes, I immediately thought of Pick too. I wrote apps using Advanced Revelations in the 90s and read that it was based on Pick, then read a bit about Pick’s approach. Great idea here, of nothing else but innovative thinking at play. Also once a Novell CNE and mourn the loss of the Bindery and NDS initiative.

By: Anthony Youngman

Anthony Youngman — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 18:15:37 +0000

In reply to Mark S Waterbury.

> The Pick system was always a multi-user database system, with only a bare minimum of an “OS” enough to run the PICK database on a given hardware platform.

Think, if I’ve got it right, of CP/M or MS-DOS. They provided a minimal set of hardware manipulation routines. That they happened to come with a bunch of useful programs is by the bye. Each program you ran had SOLE control of the machine.

The Pick database was the same. It had sole control of the machine, but because it was the only program on the machine it didn’t need an OS, and contained all the OS functionality it needed, inside itself.

Cheers,
Wol

By: Anthony Youngman

Anthony Youngman — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 16:22:44 +0000

In reply to Ralph Clark.

Agreed. SQL is (of necessity) a database engine in its own right! It ignores Einstein’s dictum “make things as simple as possible (but no simpler)” with a vengeance!

SQL is a query system designed to query unstructured data. It then has all the smarts to structure it as required. And on top of that, it’s a data manipulation language. OUCH, OUCH, AND TRIPLE OUCH. I’ve been well aware of points 1 & 2 for ages – the structure stuff belongs in the database schema, not the query language. I’m not so sure about the data manipulation side of things, but it complicates things something awful.

This is where the Unix dictum “Do one thing, and do it well” really *SHOULD* be applied, whereas SQL is a jack-of-all-trades, and incompetent to boot …

Cheers,
Wol

By: Anthony Youngman

Anthony Youngman — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 16:17:47 +0000

In reply to Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Bear in mind, Linux IS JUST THE KERNEL.

So I think you mean “it does not use the GNU userland”

🙂

Cheers,
Wol (a dedicated Pr1mate)

BTW, don’t forget, when Informix tried to eat Ardent, it was Ardent emerged the victor (in practice if not in name) before IBM took over Informix in order to get their hands on the Pick assets, and then they dumped it because rumour had it it was busy eating DB/2’s lunch.