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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: david_si who wrote (47131)	6/22/2000 5:08:00 PM
From: SunSpot	Respond to of 74651

The difference lies in how you access data. Many places use SQL between the applications and the software on the server to obtain data, but this requires the database server to know all data. Instead, it is possible to distribute data on several servers and retrieve the data you need. A good example is a TV-program on the net: It gets its data from various places. It stores it in one or several databases available for the web-servers. There is no single database, where all data origins. Typically, the best database system for this purpose is a B-tree, which is available for free as open-source. SQL would only make this system pretty complicated and demand a big database server to handle the load. Database systems today are very specialized. Most big e-commerce sites, that essentially are database systems, have programmers employed. In order to make everything scale well, systems are designed so there is no single point through which all data must flow, and often, there is no single computer on which it all depends. It is normally cheaper to do this with scripting and programming than by setting up a gigantic, clustered SQL-based database server, but the result is the same. Inprise works heavily on introducing their MIDAS technology in their programming tools. The idea is quite simple: Do DCOM or CORBA calls and retrieve datasets with a very lightweight protocol. Additionally, the system is stateless, which makes it unnecessary for the server to remember which users are connected. It works via a proprietary TCP/IP protocol, via DCOM or via CORBA. Microsoft works on SOAP. Since ADO is a database interface where SQL is not needed, and ADO works with COM, and COM will be compatible with SOAP, Microsoft provides a simple technology for accessing data across the web without SQL. And there are big amounts of proprietary ad-hoc solutions doing exactly the same. The internet is becom¡ng one big computer.