> can you guess? wrote: > >> can you run a database on RMS? > >> > > > > As well as you could on must Unix file systems. > And you've been able to do so for almost three > decades now (whereas features like asynchronous and > direct I/O are relative newcomers in the Unix > environment). > > nny, I remember trying to help customers move their > applications from > TOPS-20 to VMS, back in the early 1980s, and finding > that the VMS I/O > capabilities were really badly lacking.
Funny how that works: when you're not familiar with something, you often mistake your own ignorance for actual deficiencies. Of course, the TOPS-20 crowd was extremely unhappy at being forced to migrate at all, and this hardly improved their perception of the situation. If you'd like to provide specifics about exactly what was supposedly lacking, it would be possible to evaluate the accuracy of your recollection. RMS was an > abomination -- > nothing but trouble, Again, specifics would allow an assessment of that opinion. and another layer to keep you > away from your data. Real men use raw disks, of course. And with RMS (unlike Unix systems of that era) you could get very close to that point if you wanted to without abandoning the file level of abstraction - or work at a considerably more civilized level if you wanted that with minimal sacrifice in performance (again, unlike the Unix systems of that era, where storage performance was a joke until FFS began to improve things - slowly). VMS and RMS represented a very different philosophy than Unix: you could do anything, and therefore were exposed to the complexity that this flexibility entailed. Unix let you do things one simple way - whether it actually met your needs or not. Back then, efficient use of processing cycles (even in storage applications) could be important - and VMS and RMS gave you that option. Nowadays, trading off cycles to obtain simplicity is a lot more feasible, and the reasons for the complex interfaces of yesteryear can be difficult to remember. - bill This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
