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What is like the Ingres that I remember?
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metalwor...@gmail.com
Apr 24, 2015, 7:27:19 PM4/24/15
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Back in the later 80's I worked in computers. This was back in the halcyon days when kids were hired right out of high school to do major programming. I got out of programming, but I remember a large system that I wrote using, believe it or don't, PC-Ingres. Part of the system was run on Vaxen and it was primarily based on PCs (PC-ATs, if I remember correctly) and it was quite complex. Dozens and dozens of hand-coded screens (not just QBF stuff) and many many reports and manual processes run from batch files.
Anyway, although I haven't worked in computers for over 25 years, I got it into my head recently that I'd like to write a CMMS for my actual real job. I'm curious if anyone knows of a system available today (hopefully free!) which is similar to what I remember. A screen editor, a report editor.. maybe they're all like that. I wouldn't know - I haven't touched an RDB since that job almost 30 years ago.
Any thoughts?
Mike
Anyway, although I haven't worked in computers for over 25 years, I got it into my head recently that I'd like to write a CMMS for my actual real job. I'm curious if anyone knows of a system available today (hopefully free!) which is similar to what I remember. A screen editor, a report editor.. maybe they're all like that. I wouldn't know - I haven't touched an RDB since that job almost 30 years ago.
Any thoughts?
Mike
Roy Hann
Apr 25, 2015, 4:59:18 AM4/25/15
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still in the product set and works the way you remember. (Well, apart
from no longer having to SET MEMORY every five minutes to force garbage
collection!) ABF, QBF, Report Writer--it's all there.
The big difference is that you can have it for free now if you download
the community version from
http://esd.actian.com/product/Community_Projects/Ingres_Database.
You don't mention whether you prefer QUEL or SQL; QUEL is virtually
unchanged since the late '80s, Ingres SQL has kept pace pretty well with
most widely used SQL dialects.
Roy (Ingres user since May 1984)
metalwor...@gmail.com
Apr 26, 2015, 11:52:18 AM4/26/15
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Roy, thanks so much for the reply. So Ingres is still the same? That's wild. It still amazes me how little real trouble I had building that system with PC-Ingres. It processed thousands of items per day and accumulated them for years. When I was almost done my bosses took me to one of Mr. Stonebreaker's conferences, and I met him briefly, and he seemed surprised that anyone was using PC-Ingres for a production system.
As for the Quel vs. SQL thing, I originally chose Quel because, as I dimly recall, SQL at the time didn't deal well with relational retrievals. You couldn't retrieve a record from one table based on information in another, matched up by the TID, or whatever. I'm sure it can do it now, but my recollection is that at the time you had to build a view to make the two (three, whatever) tables look like one table, so that SQL could deal with it. Quel dealt with it easily. Then after a month of work one of my managers decided he wanted to learn SQL (the way of the future!) so he asked me to rewrite it in SQL, but after giving it a good, hard look I gave up and told him that it wasn't worth the effort of trying to switch it.
Anyway, I was just a 17 year old at the time, scooped out of high school. I knew nothing. Still don't. :)
Mike
As for the Quel vs. SQL thing, I originally chose Quel because, as I dimly recall, SQL at the time didn't deal well with relational retrievals. You couldn't retrieve a record from one table based on information in another, matched up by the TID, or whatever. I'm sure it can do it now, but my recollection is that at the time you had to build a view to make the two (three, whatever) tables look like one table, so that SQL could deal with it. Quel dealt with it easily. Then after a month of work one of my managers decided he wanted to learn SQL (the way of the future!) so he asked me to rewrite it in SQL, but after giving it a good, hard look I gave up and told him that it wasn't worth the effort of trying to switch it.
Anyway, I was just a 17 year old at the time, scooped out of high school. I knew nothing. Still don't. :)
Mike
Roy Hann
Apr 27, 2015, 3:42:43 AM4/27/15
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No, Ingres has come a long way, but without losing backward compatibility
or dropping all the old tools. (vigraph is gone but that's about the only
loss I can think of, and I don't think it was ever available in PC-Ingres.)
> As for the Quel vs. SQL thing, I originally chose Quel because, as I dimly
> recall, SQL at the time didn't deal well with relational retrievals.
> You couldn't retrieve a record from one table based on information in
> another, matched up by the TID, or whatever.
I'm among the first to call SQL every kind of disappointing crap, but
there aren't many situations where (explicitly) joining on the TID
is desirable. Whatever SQL's flaws, that ain't one of them.
> I'm sure it can do it
> now, but my recollection is that at the time you had to build a view
> to make the two (three, whatever) tables look like one table, so that
> SQL could deal with it. Quel dealt with it easily.
You may be thinking of computing aggregates. Until relatively recently SQL
forced you into using views where QUEL didn't. SQL now supports common
table expressions (CTEs) and subqueries in the FROM clause. Inelegant and
verbose, but at least you don't need a litter of special purpose views
quite the way you used to.
Roy
or dropping all the old tools. (vigraph is gone but that's about the only
loss I can think of, and I don't think it was ever available in PC-Ingres.)
> As for the Quel vs. SQL thing, I originally chose Quel because, as I dimly
> recall, SQL at the time didn't deal well with relational retrievals.
> You couldn't retrieve a record from one table based on information in
> another, matched up by the TID, or whatever.
there aren't many situations where (explicitly) joining on the TID
is desirable. Whatever SQL's flaws, that ain't one of them.
> I'm sure it can do it
> now, but my recollection is that at the time you had to build a view
> to make the two (three, whatever) tables look like one table, so that
> SQL could deal with it. Quel dealt with it easily.
forced you into using views where QUEL didn't. SQL now supports common
table expressions (CTEs) and subqueries in the FROM clause. Inelegant and
verbose, but at least you don't need a litter of special purpose views
quite the way you used to.
Roy
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