RE: Is a RDBMS needed?

From: Goulet, Richard <>
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:16:06 -0400
Message-ID: <>

Well, for those who never heard of Ada
( it's link to PL/SQL, the US DOD has/had an Ada Joint Systems Program Office(JSPO) in the Pentagon back in the 80's. The idea was to create a replacement for Cobol, Jovial, C-Atlas, Fortran, and a lot of other computer languages that was costing them lots of dollars to maintain each year. The usual capitalistic idea was to have DOD in conjunction with universities, primarily MIT I believe, create a computer language to handle all of this advanced processing and then incentivize as well as punish contractors into using this new language there by replacing all of the previously created and unmanageable stuff. Sounds like a good idea, right? You add money to a procurement contract when the contractor uses Ada and you penalize them when they don't by removing money or making them prove they can't do what they need with the new language. And to promote the reuse of existing modules you add more bonuses. Problem, the compile sequence can overwrite modules in the standard library thereby making it appear that you reused an existing module. OOPS!!! Oracle also in conjunction with the Ada JSPO crated what was known as PRO*Ada, which worked very well ( ).

Anyway, after some time creating Ada, the master engineer supposedly retired from the Ada JSPO and went to work for Oracle. About a year later we were all introduced to PL/SQL. ( and

Richard Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/Na Team Leader

-----Original Message-----
[] On Behalf Of
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2011 1:38 AM
Subject: RE: Is a RDBMS needed?

>"Goulet, Richard" <>
anyone ever hear of Ada? Few billions of US tax payer dollars went down that black hole to no good end and that was supported by one of the largest institutions in the world, the US Pentagon. So much for who supports it.
BTW: If you've ever heard of PL/SQL then you've heard of Ada, by another name.

I beg pardon. Billions must have gone into a secret UFO laboratory. But judging from PL/SQL - ADA is a beauty. An attempt to depart from years old, obscure and unreadable C syntax. No offence intended - as far as I remember one of design reasons for {}-usage instead of readable BEGIN-END/END IF/END LOOP was to save space and typing time... And that is only one example. No longer an issue on the modern hardware...

as for the original question - this is a university, right ? Let them give a try. May be some javadb++ will come out of it ( ACID compliant and all )

Brgds, Laimis N


Received on Fri Jun 10 2011 - 09:16:06 CDT

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