Re: Article on new mainframe use

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

One major crack in this wall came with the introduction of relational
DBMSes, particularly ones using SQL as their interface language: suddenly,
the use of such databases became very much a core “business” need.
>
The best way to interface to such a DBMS was to be able to generate SQL
strings on the fly; but this required some facility with manipulation of
dynamic, variable-length strings, which COBOL completely lacked. And so
special extensions were tacked on, just to cope with the generation of SQL
queries and templates.

I was brought in as consultant to small client/server startup, two
former Oracle people (that we had worked on doing cluster scale-up for
HA/CMP) were there responsible for "commerce server" and wanted to do
payment transactions on the server, the startup had also invented SSL
they wanted to use, the result is now frequently called ecommerce.

First webservers were flat files ... but later there were increasing
RDBMS-based webservers that were experiencing increase number of
exploits. One problem was that as part of periodic maintenance, the
internet interfaces were shutdown, multiple layers of firewalls and
security facilities shutdown; maintenance performed and process reversed
to bring webserver back up. WEBSERVER RDBMS mainteance tended to be much
more complex and time consuming (than flat file based webservers)
... and they were frequently in big rush to get back online, failed to
reactivate all the firewall and security facilities.

trivia: I worked with Jim Gray and Vera Watson on the original
SQL/relational implementation, "System/R". Also we were able to do
technical transfer to Endicott (under the "radar" while corporation was
preoccupied with "EAGLE", next great DBMS) for SQL/DS. Then when "EAGLE"
imploded, there was a request for how fast could "System/R" be ported to
MVS (eventually released as DB2).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970