Simon,
I will talk to them about the specs about their interface too. Ill let you know what happens. By the way incase you missed it, Caché is the newest consolidated version of the 4GL language MUMPS, or some call it M now. It does look very powerful and massively scalable. Ive been asking myself why this language and DB didnt take off more then it has, and Im guessing the answer is that it was originally developed for medicine, and its OO which may have put it out of reach for some SQL developers? In general because of its structure Im pretty sure an interface from Squeak would be a nice fit. It appears to be an OODB with some history and experience.
In my previous position as Principal Software Engineer for a pretty big health care company I used Versant. We were way out front with it. We looked at Gemstone but found that Versant was much closer to what we needed. We ended up having a lot of problems with Versant. We were already a few years into developing on Versant when during deployment things went wrong. We may have been pushing the envelope on their product, but when we started getting mixed results back without changing data we finally decided to switch to Oracle. (After some time working with support, to their credit, Versant was able to get us a patch for the problem, but by then we, our owners and financial backers were shell shocked, and needed to find something that was actually, and was considered by others, production quality DBMS)
Ive been leery of OODBMS since then and found that Oracle and Toplink was a pretty good fit for large scale production apps. (Although we did make a lot of modifications to Toplink :) )
My interest like I said is mostly interfacing to existing systems. Ill let you know what intersystems says about the specs.
Ron Teitelbaum Ron@USMedRec.com
-----Original Message----- From: squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Simon Kirk Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 7:28 AM To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list Subject: Re: Caché Database System Integration With Squeak
Hi again Ron.
Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
Simon,
Thanks for the response. The VA (US Veterans Administration) uses Caché
for
their medical record system and I would like to attach squeak to that system.
Nice to know that there's a large-scale organisation like that using Caché - you guys will carry considerable clout for getting them to change things if needed :)
It really concerns me that you are having this problem with ODBC on Linux. Have you considered their XML interface, or do you think that would be way to slow?
I must confess I didn't know there was an XML interface. However, I suspect that it may be a reasonable way to go given a fast enough link between the client and server machines, and fast enough client and server hardware. Of course I have no quantifiable metrics for this, but now you've mentioned this interface I'll probably take a look at it.
I was hoping to add support by extending their projection classes to generate Smalltalk objects, and to connect up using ODBC. Im glad you mentioned this problem, since Im running on windows, and I wouldnt have discovered this problem until later while trying to run this on linux.
Glad to have been of help :)
I would love to see squeak drivers, have you contacted them about the
specs?
I haven't yet asked them about their specs directly. I've dropped a few hints in support emails but they've either missed them or ignored them - hopefully not the latter as that would indicate that they don't want to give them up. Still, that's nothing but guesswork and I just hadn't got around to asking them properly yet - so many other things on the go at the moment. However if there are two clients asking for the same thing, it would hopefully mean they'd be willing to cooperate; I can't really see why they wouldn't want us to add to the range of interfaces to Caché.
Cheers, Simon
This message has been scanned for viruses by BlackSpider MailControl - www.blackspider.com