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Aucbvax.2192 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Thu Jul 9 06:09:48 1981 Reliability >From Joe.Newcomer@CMU-10A Thu Jul 9 06:06:06 1981 I have contended for several years that I don't need better languages, compilers, or editors NEARLY as much as I need a database management system. Alas, the conventional DBMS is oriented to social security records. I once mentioned "well, you put all that on a database" to someone and they immediately began to explain how they had variable-length text which a database system "couldn't handle". Of course, a large class of uninteresting systems think in terms of fixed-length records, but what we lose by ignoring them is that they solve a whole lot of other problems. I once worked in the "real world" on a banking system, and it is a good way to learn to be paranoid about hardware and software. When you start playing with millions of dollars of real bucks, and find that people audit their checking accounts (and even interest on savings) to the nearest penny, AND your company has posted a mongo amount of dollars in bond to back up their promise that they WON'T screw up, you find that redundancy is a way of life. DBMS systems have all had to deal with this class of problems; the fact that their image of the data is prehistoric does not invalidate the other solutions.

>From a personal workstation viewpoint, the problem is to implement the redundancy of state at a very low cost. If my machine crashes, I want to boot it and get the display looking just like it did before the crash, having lost perhaps a few small edits, or the mail message I was composing (if it was shorter than some low threshold) or possibly the window I just the instant before had brought up. Doing this cheaply requires ingenuity. joe

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