Re: Ada package registry?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

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"Björn Lundin" <b.f.lundin@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:n90hnb$3bd$1@dont-email.me...
> On 2016-02-04 22:21, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> "Björn Lundin" <b.f.lundin@gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:n901l6$b7$1@dont-email.me...
>>> On 2016-02-04 17:59, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>>>> On 2016-02-04 17:52, Björn Lundin wrote:
>>>>> On 2016-02-03 23:11, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> ...
>>> Especially bad is when a customer cannot pull data to Excel.
>>
>> Why would that be hard? I do it all the time in my programs, no database 
>> (or
>> even persistent storage) in sight. It's easy to read/write .csv files in
>> Ada, and I believe that someone even has a library for writing .xls 
>> files.
>
> Yeah, having millions of records in .csv and
> joining with a couple of other .csv files with
> the same amount of data and
> sounds like a really good idea...
> If you got plenty of time, that is.

Huh? You said that it is hard to pull data to Excel, and I disagreed. You 
didn't say anything about pulling *all* of the data -- and why would you do 
that? Excel would fall over if you gave it a million lines of anything - the 
maximum number of rows is (or at least was) less than that.

Obviously, you'd do the selection before exporting to Excel (the case I was 
talking about).

 > Looking at a customers trace table I see they generate about 100_000
> records a day. Order lines are around the same.
> Data saved for a month or two, before moving to long-term storage (db
> not connected to production)

Way too much data -- clearly a business that is far too large to be 
managable. I don't care too much about the problems of entities that we'd be 
better off without in the first place.

...
>> The real reason to stick with non-Ada tools is when large parts of the
>> system already are in a non-Ada language, and you're just adding to it.
>
> Nope, the real reason is that SQL is a good enough way for
> non-engineers (read economists/warehouse manager etc) to make reports.
> They do not write their own Ada programs. They do not care.
> They want to use Excel and get data in ways THEY understand.

Surely. But the number of such people that can understand SQL well enough to 
do anything beyond the trivial has to be countable on fingers and toes. They 
typically use report tools to get such data, and those tools surely wouldn't 
have to be based on SQL (or anything in particular).

> I'd like to hear of an ERP system (or WMS) that does NOT
> use a DBMS, and has customers with 1_000+ employees.

I don't care about systems for organizations that necessarily are in hell. I 
*hope* they waste their time with fancy ERP systems rather than getting 
anything done so they can go out of business faster... :-)

                             Randy.