relational for what? [was: Design Principles Behind Smalltalk,
Revisited]
Marcel Weiher
marcel at metaobject.com
Wed Jan 3 08:25:46 UTC 2007
On Jan 2, 2007, at 12:36 , Howard Stearns wrote:
> I'm new to the Enterprise Software world, having been mostly in
> either industrial or "hard problem" software. But the 3-tier
> application architecture we use for financial processing at our 26
> state campuses (University of Wisconsin) appears to me to be
> typical: large numbers of individual browser (not communicating with
> each other) interact through a Web server farm to the Application
> Servers. The overall application is too large as implemented to
> allow the load to be accommodated, so it is divided by functional
> area into a farm of individual applications that do not talk
> directly to each other. This partitioning isn't very successful,
> because the users tend to do the same functional activities at the
> same times of day, so most of the applications sit idle while a few
> are at their limit. I assumed that a single database was used so
> that the RDBMS could ensure data consistency between all these
> different applications.
This sounds so incredibly familiar, even if the domain is quite
different. And I thought that financial processing would be the one
area where RDBMSes would be able to shine...
> But it turns out that the Oracle database can't handle that, so
> instead, each functional area gets its own database. Most of the
> work done by the system (and most of the work of programmers like
> me) is to COPY data from one table to another at night when the
> system is otherwise quiet.
And of course use various bits of
> Maybe this isn't typical, but it is the architecture that Oracle and
> its PeopleSoft division pushes on us in their extensive training
> classes. And it appears to be the architecture discussed in the
> higher education IT conferences and Web sites in the U.S.
I am starting to fear that it *is* typical. Good thing I am now
pretty much completely out of the enterprisey world. :-)
Cheers,
Marcel
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