Re: A Customer's Request For Open Source Software

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Robert I. Eachus wrote:

> Stephane Richard wrote:
>  > But like you say, no matter what, the back end should definitaly be
>  > done in Ada...:-)....no two ways about that
> 
> I strongly believe in using the right tool for the job.  For a lot of an
> accounting system, that seems to be databases or spreadsheets.  But not 
> necessarily.
...
> Now for 90+% of the actual use, the file system is not involved. 
> (Completing a transaction forces a journal write.)  But let's go a bit 
> further, the journalling can be to NVRAM, for example a Compact Flash 
> card.  The effort to memory map such a card would not be too great, and 
> now we have an accounting system that is hard-disk (and file-system) 
> free in operation.
> 
> Why do that?  Because in the next few years, NVRAM is going to replace 
> DRAM.  I can't tell you WHICH variety of NVRAM, AMD has a very nice 
> polymer memory developed with Coatue, which AMD just bought. Motorola, 
> IBM and others are working on MRAM.  Molecular electronic memory is 
> unlikely to be the first to market, but may eventually be the winning 
> entry in the race.
...
> I've probably said enough for now...
>                                                    Robert I. Eachus

The problem is that even when NVRAM (in whatever form) becomes
cheap and plentiful, addressing it still remains a problem. Assume
that molecular memory becomes cheap and you have Petabytes+ of memory
to waste with home movies and wave files.  Do you want to use 1024 bit
addresses to gain access to each byte of it?

For this reason, even if memory becomes plentiful (as one hopes it
will), it will still likely become "packaged" similar to the way
disk I/O occur today.  We just won't call it track and cylinder
any more, but we'll fetch bunches of memory by some block address
on an as needed basis.

So I don't see the role of a RDBMs changing much, as a result. Only
the amount that we have to manage, and the media that it is stored
upon.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg