This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Paul Brown.
Original Post: SQL is to BPEL as Oracle is to...
Feed Title: mult.ifario.us
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MultifariousCategoryJava
Feed Description: Software. Business. Java. XML. Web Services.
A recent post from Mike Lehmann draws a parallel that I'm fond of:YearFormal ConstructCommercial ObjectStandardCompany1977relational algebrarelational databaseSQLOracle2004process algebraexecution engineBPEL???It would be pure hubris to share my thoughts on how to fill-in the "???", so I won't tempt the gods (for the moment).When attempting to reproduce a success, knowing what happened is much less useful than knowing why it happened. (Mechanical attempts are repeating successes usually fail because of changes in the context.) In spite of the fact that the computing and corporate landscapes are completely different in 2004 than in the late 1970s, exploring some of the history around the early days of the relational database makes for interesting reading. (Software history in general is of equal interest.)An interview of Wayne Ratliff, the original programmer of the dBASE database, is a good example. Here, Wayne is talking about his original distribution mechanism of advertising in Byte and mailing disks to people:Susan Lammers: Why didn't you try to sell it to a bigger company, or hire some help?Wayne Ratliff: It didn't occur to me. There weren't any big companies then. As far as I knew, everybody was a real small outfit. A professor at the University of Washington and his wife were considering taking over marketing when George Tate and Hal Lashlee called. They came over and looked at a demo; even though something always goes wrong during a demo, they were understanding, they knew about demos. I was very impressed by that fact. When most people view a demo, after the first thing goes wrong they lose interest. George and Hal already had a business called Discount Software. They had one employee--they made it sound like they had a whole host of employees, but they really had only one. Also, they were close by, about ten or fifteen miles away. It seemed like a natural to me. They made an offer for exclusive marketing rights, and I accepted. We continued under that arrangement for about two or three years.Sounds like demos, among other things, haven't changed in the last 25 years…
Previous Topic
