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To: i-node who wrote (3896)	12/29/1999 8:59:00 PM
From: David R	Respond to of 5102

RE: So, a RDBMS is a more complex product than, say, Linux? I don't think I agree with this premise... Nor would I (though I have not done development on either). An RDBMS runs on top of an OS, and relies on the services of the OS to operate (i.e. Threading, task scheduling, access synchronization, memory management, device support, hardware abstraction, etc.). The last time I checked, these were not trivial development items.

To: i-node who wrote (3896)	12/29/1999 10:39:00 PM
From: Kiriakos Georgiou	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

That's all nice, but you overestimate the power of the internet user community when it comes to complex projects like a modern RDBMS. So, a RDBMS is a more complex product than, say, Linux? I don't think I agree with this premise... Linux is a (average) kernel, and people from all over the world have written and continue to write standalone programs, utilities, modules, etc that work on linux and other unix variants, and collectively all these programs make up the "linux" operating system. Lots of this code was not written specifically for linux. Unix scales well for the internet development model, although a strong argument can be made that without the FSF a lot of projects like linux wouldn't exist today. One the other hand, an RDBMS is a huge system that can be thought as an operating system on top of an operating system that provides a higher level of abstraction. All of its parts are tightly integrated and tuned to work together so you can't really have 500 utilities that when added together give you the RDB operating environment. It's one big project that you can't break-up to many pieces and distribute them accordingly. Look around and see if there is any industrial strength RDBMS developed with the linux model. The ones that are out there are a joke (mySql comes to mind) and no serious IT group would use them. Not to mention support and documentation. Have you seen a single unit open source project with 5,000 pages of high quality documentation? Sybase ASE RDBMS documentation in PDF format is over 5k pages and its quality is outstanding. No brainer, the answer to the question is yes. Kiriakos