2 Apr 2000 Rasputin   » (Journeyer)

Ain' t it amazing what a little sleep can do ;)

While poking through the daily diary entries, noted a couple of things that need commenting on. First a minor correction...

Schoen - the FreeBSD-QA mailing list started just before we shipped 3.4, although it didn't get real attention until just before 4.0. There had been a lot of whining about the lack of solid testing for stable, one thing led to another and there we were ;)

Asmodai - Having sat on the committe that wrote SQL-99 (ISO Joint Technical Committee 1) I guess I should explain a little about why the storage mechanism for pre-compiled stored procs isn't covered within the standards. Standards have to be written to set a minimum level of support and compliance without imposing (where possible) limits on extensions and improvements. We felt (and still believe) that specifying a language should not include forcing an implementation. By enforcing compiled compatibility across vendor platforms, we would effectively be forcing one vendor's methodologies to be the standard. The reason stored procs are so efficient is they can be optimized to take advantage of the underlying implementation. The optimizations for Oracle are substantially different from those for Sybase because the underlying database engine is substantially different. These products also store pre-compiled procedures differently. This approach also allowed us to permit vendor extensions to the language (PL/SQL or iSQL) while ensuring a minimum level of cross platform compatability (mostly enforced with the fips flag).

There's actually a lot more to the problem than I've explained here, so maybe I'll do an article on the standards process over the next couple of weeks to examine this further. Feel free to pester me about this if I let it slip a little ;)

I'm having second thoughts about a person to person messaging system in an environment like Advogato's. Is there any desire for something like this in the community at large? Any thoughts? My initial thoughts on this are that a wholly self-contained messaging area (within Advogato) would eat tremendous amounts of resources and quickly become unmanageable. An e-mail link (possibly hidden unless otherwise flagged by the owner), much like in SourceForge might be a slightly better idea. It would obviously have to be done outside the context of "mailto:", else we force a specific subset of browsers to use it. I'll give this more thought and continue this <babble> tomorrow.

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