Re: PostgreSql and VMS operating System

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
>>
>