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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