Over the years people have developed an unbelievable number of coding languages. They all do pretty much the same job in pretty much the same way. Personally I have coded in Mercury Autocode, COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, LISP, Assembler, PERL, basic, C, C++ and JavaScript plus probably some others I have forgotten. Check the list of popular coding languages and you won’t find any of these except C variants and JavaScript1. That is because I have been out of the business for a while and coding languages are items of fashion. Every couple of years a new language becomes the latest hot language. Right now that is Python for reasons that totally escape me.
To make this clear. The world only needs a couple of coding languages, one for regular applications and another (maybe) to write operating systems in. None of the languages for general coding discussed here are a significant improvement on PL/1 which was invented in the 1960s2 , except for support for object orientation, which at the time had not been invented. Had a PL/2 been developed with Objects supported we could all just get on with coding.
When I need some information I used to just type into Google and sort out what I want from the results. But a few months ago, got on the Bing Chat pre-release program It is a whole new way of finding information. Google’s version is now out called Bard. Both give excellent results, but my impression is that Bard is better but with a major drawback.
I started coding in then 1960’s on a Ferranti Mercury. It was as big as a house and had less computer power than my watch. But at the time we thought it was pretty cool. Over the years, Moor’s Law turned out to be pretty accurate. The most powerful computers doubled in power about every two years. Commercial systems got smaller. From as big as a house, to the size of a room, to the size of a desk, then a largeish box in a rack.
But in the mid 1970’s something happened off the Moore’s Law track. They managed to fit all the components of a low-power computer on a single chip. They were mass produced and relatively cheap. The engineers that built it had in mind using them for process control, calculators or computer terminals.
Enter Gary Kildall
Gary Kildall
But a genius called Gary Kildall saw another potential use for these devices.
I recently went back to one of my old projects to see how it is working out. And it is looking great. It started as a quick demonstration site and now it is an important resource for the FinTech industry.
A schema means different things for an SQL and a NOSQL database management system. If you are using SQL, you have to tell the system about the format of the data before you can use – that is the schema. When it comes to NOSQL databases everything is different. You don’t need a schema, you simply present data and the system stores it in whatever format you send it.
Each document in a collection1 can be a different layout and different types of data. The flexibility of NOSQL databases suggests that data design is less important. For example I read: “… since NoSQL doesn’t necessitate the need for a schema, you avoid the expense and time of that initial design stage.”
When we all got locked down, I needed a project to keep my brain active. (That gets important as you get older: I just had my 80th birthday). My wife is learning Spanish and I tried writing a novel (it didn’t fly). In the end I decided to do something that I was good at – software development. I wrote a generic system to update and query a database using node.js. Test system here: http://www.sudsjs.com.
The database is accessed through a driver, which initially was written and tested for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite 3. Since then, I have implemented (or tried) various NOSQL systems. So here is a summary and a link to any blog posts about all of the databases I have used.
The sales manager came down to the IT department and looked around. He spotted a young developer who looked a bit bored. His name plate said ‘Luke’. “I have a small job for you if you are interested”. Luke nodded. “We get sales orders from out customers. The warehouse handles them but we can’t get access to the data. Can you write a little program to store then on a computer for me.” Luke looked at a file of sample orders. “Sure no problem.”
He turned to the jaded old database administrator (Joda) in the corner “This is a great application for a NOSQL Document database like MongoDB or CouchDB.” Joda looked up – “That is a decision, regret you will”. Luke muttered something about ‘luddite’ and went back to his desk and coded up one NOSQL document per sales order, with customer details and an embedded array of order lines. The logical way to solve the problem.
I learned my software skills on the Ferranti Mercury computer. It had as I recall 468 words of memory (a word is about 6 bytes so call it 3k bytes). Let’s see, my phone has 8,000,000,000 bytes – that’s about 2.5 million times more. My phone makes the 1500 instructions per second look pretty silly as well.
The computer was big. The electronics used valves and they get hot. So each cabinet has a refrigerating unit built-in, and they were noisy.
My COVID lockdown project is a system to keep a database updated called SUDSJS. I am using it to check out different database management systems (DBMS). The latest is CouchDB – and I like it
I decided to use my lockdown project SUDSJS.com to test out a few different NOSQL database management systems (DBMS).
SUDSJS is written in JavaScript using the node.js server-side system and I designed it so that I could plug in different drivers for different databases. I wrote database drivers for MySQL, SQLite 3 and PostgreSQL. The first NOSQL system I tried was MongoDB, and the SUDSJS.com test site is currently running using this (correction – it is now running on CouchDB). The second NOSQL system I tried was Firestore from Google.
Bob Browning's blog 