Daniel L. Johnson wrote:


There always seems to be complaint, at least between the lines, about the database engine behind Vista: not relational, hard to learn, hard to read, crufty. To what extent are these negatives realistic hindrances to dissemination and use, and what genuine strengths of its database are being overlooked or minimised?



This is basically 'check list' or administrative 'best practices' talk. M has always had a very strong presence in health care applications. Some of the largest commerical systems in the world use M. For example, the commerical physician billing system from IDX (BAR) uses M. IDX is currently very well represented in academic medical centers, probably the leading vendor. In our case, we run that on top of a commerical M, Cache' from Intersystems. Because we also run Oracle for data mart access, I can say that each is very good in their own way. Our current implementation of Cache is so much faster and robust than the DSM we were running a few years ago, that I can imagine some technical folks still looking at DSM thinking M obsolete. But it's not the technology, it's the implementations that age...... The technology continues to advance. There are SQL interfaces into M database's. M's transactional performance is on par with Oracle and maybe even better depending upon application design.

I think support costs, in terms of operational labor expenses are about equivalent at the medium to large scale. We have two Oracle DBA's and one M systems expert backed up by experts on contract from the vendor.
Licensing terms are hard for me to compare, as Oracle is covered by a campus site license and Cache' is covered out of our budget directly.


The one complaint that one could have with M in the open source context, is that until GT.M. there was no commerical strength or free implementation. That's still true for non-Linux platforms. In the relational world, Oracle, IBM and MS are facing increasing competition from MySQL and Postgress and there are a variety of other contenders such as SAP-DB.



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