Radoslaw, Let me give a different view about IMS. If one takes a different perspective and looks at the historical timeline, many companies developed their core infrastructure applications during the 1970's, and IMS was well-suited for it. These applications have proved enduring and scalable, and there has been no economic reason to displace them. Granted, there were applications placed there which should not have been, and most of those have been re-hosted, but in general they are there because they work, and they work economically, reliably, and well.
Once the core infrastructure applications were in place, other applications, which were deferred and were complementary to the core applications, such as ad hoc queries, etc., exploited new relational data bases and platforms. Email, spreadsheets, and a host of other applications fall into this same category. And by the way, when new financial institutions start up, such as in China and south-east Asia, what platform do they use? IMS, as it turns out. IBM has had double-digit new license IMS growth in these areas for some time now. Tom Harper NEON Enterprise Software, Inc. Radoslaw Skorupka wrote: Bad assumption IMHO. Mainframe is a dino, a lot of things still exist on mainframe because of conservative users. At a risk of starting new war I can provide some examples: a) VSE. It is obsolete, insecure, in fact "moribound". Oftenly it is run on very small machines, so this workload could be easily run on cheaper platform. The problem is nobody migrated the application. b) IMS. Yeah, I know that many big companies still use it and are very happy of it. Question is how many *new* applications are IMS-based, why other platforms do not have IMS-like database. They have DB2 and other relational databases, but not IMS. c) ISAM. It is dead now. Death sentence was known for 30+ years. Even few years ago there still were shops using ISAM files. d) TPF. Similar status to VSE. -- Radoslaw Skorupka Lodz, Poland ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
