Re: PostgreSql and VMS operating System

There was a book called Thriving on Chaos around eighties or nineties which
took VMS as an example of Technology Industry Leaderhsip and said their
technology leadership might
be taken for granted for only 18 months by which time Competitors could
probably catch up.

But then I had said that VMS seems to have become a small
userbase operating system not for competitors catching up but sudden boom
for small servers where everyone went for Unix
so I felt that it might be worth taking a relook again for postgresql and
python and combination.

On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 6:34 PM Vish Penmetsa <vish(dot)penmetsa(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> Anyway probably it might be good for postgres hackers to go thru some
> strengths of VMS with an R&D Engineer rather than my speaking - I also
> worked in presales and I am not an R&D Engineer so...
>
> On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 5:17 PM Vish Penmetsa <vish(dot)penmetsa(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
>
>> Unix is a programmer's operating system and obviously programmes like it.
>>
>> About VMS there is a bit of history that Bill Gates from Microsft had
>> hired Bill Cutler from the VMS Team to build Windows operating system.
>>
>> And obviously at that time the focus was more on Windows interfaces
>> rather than the VMS like OS which was more of a server.
>>
>> And when it comes to PostgreSQl whe will be really loking at the server
>> side of things rather than it's user interface capabilities where one
>> migth Windows to be far more
>> useful and easy.
>>
>> DEC had lost of the following Industry leading Advantages - DECNet ->
>> TCP/IP
>> OSF - Linux
>> Alpha architecture - Everyone caught up with 64 bit chips while DEC Alpha
>> was the first 64 bit chip.
>> Cluster Architecture -> Oracle & RAC & Unix
>>
>> And in all these we have'n t looked at the core strengths of how the
>> operating system was built for server operations.
>>
>> Probably one has to start with the assumption that it is somehow
>> extremely good and try your best to prove it.
>>
>> One example I could give as to why I am keen on VMS is something about
>> the OS learning about exeutable images to make the startup fast.
>>
>> Then coming to teh user accounts there is something abour working sets
>> for tuning and these were advatages when you were talking about 32 MB of
>> memory or 64 MB of memory
>> for large no of users rather than 32 GB or 64 GB for few uers ( I have 32
>> GB on my Windows PC just for myself)
>>
>> Then there will be more.
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 3:54 PM Justin Clift <justin(at)postgresql(dot)org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2025-01-25 08:09, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> > Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
>>> >> On Fri, Jan 24, 2025 at 01:07:56AM -0800, Christophe Pettus wrote:
>>> >>> So, basically, if you want a maintained VMS port, you need to either
>>> >>> drive the project yourself, or find others who will.
>>> >
>>> >> This email thread from 2003 says VMS probably doesn't work anymore
>>> >> because of lack of testers:
>>> >>
>>> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/200301071531.h07FVWI08147%40candle.pha.pa.us#0dbc1439f51ec7842125fb8ae200b6da
>>> >
>>> > I doubt we ever had a working VMS port. There are precisely zero
>>> > references to VMS in our commit log, so certainly there was never one
>>> > that got removed. It's barely possible that PG "just worked" without
>>> > any patches under their POSIX emulation layer, but I could not find
>>> > any indication of successful users of PG-on-VMS in the mail list
>>> > archives either.
>>>
>>> As a data point, when the recent incarnation of VMS Software announced
>>> their intention to allow Community sign ups a few years ago, I went
>>> and created an account on their system to investigate. VAX VMX being
>>> one of the first multi-user systems I learned back in the day, before
>>> learning *nix. ;)
>>>
>>> Anyway, it went... poorly. Their system is so crap that users can only
>>> have a very specific set of "special" characters allowedin user
>>> passwords:
>>>
>>> $#(at)!%*&
>>>
>>> Any other symbols are accepted at password setting time, but actually
>>> cause the user login to fail.
>>>
>>> When I attempted to file a bug about this problem, they literally told
>>> me it's not a bug and it working as intended.
>>>
>>> So frankly, VMS Software are so completely clueless that I strongly
>>> recommend no-one waste their time and effort on them.
>>>
>>> Regards and best wishes,
>>>
>>> Justin Clift
>>>
>>