The Chant of the Trolloc Hordes 3281

On 27 Apr 2006 04:48:10 -0700 in alt.folklore.computers, "Tim Shoppa"

Oracle has a DB object called a sequence designed to generate just such monotonically ascending keys: often used for chronologically ordered data as Oracle date-time resolution was minimum 1 sec.

Sounds like someone is empire building. Attack their overcomplex design with the maintenance cost of the old system over the last five years: if they can't do the work within that limit, and promise close to zero corrective maintenance required, kind of hard to justify, unless the system development is purely political, or they don't know any other way to build a system: if you only know how to use a hammer, you have to treat everything as a nail.

If the old system currently runs on a PDP-11, they're nuts; if the system has changed over a long period of time since it last ran on a PDP-11, but is still file-based using multiple files, perhaps it's doing something totally different now, and that or future changes would be easier with a DB.

AFAIK Oracle DB client licenses were not very expensive, unless they are planning to use Oracle tools or apps, and even then, user runtime licenses were not expensive; normally seat licences are for use of development tools and have to optimize the use of developers against marginal extra licence costs.

Nowadays it's still sometimes more efficient to just suck everything into memory, crunch a bunch, spit everything back out, and do a bunch of renames, especially if it all fits nicely into the paradigm of your favourite little language (e.g. Perl, Python, Ruby, Eiffel, Java) and can be completed in 1-10th the time and cost.

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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