The Big Lie
Posted On: 12/15/2006
The check's in the mail. You don't look fat in those jeans.
Microsoft Office dominates because it's the best software.
PeopleSoft's only criterion for supporting a database is SQL-89
compliance. You get the point.
Once upon a time, there was a software company with a big
idea. “We're going to write cool application software for
neglected business users. We're going to implement the
client-server processing model. The client will be Windows,
and the server will be SQL. And the world will beat a path
to our doorway.” However, the little company didn't have
money for a mainframe (so the SQL server could be DB2) or
for a VAX (so the SQL server could be RDB), so they chose
Gupta's SQLBase as their SQL server. Why? It ran on
Windows and it was cheap.
1989: Database platforms are chosen on price.
To be fair, SQLBase was impressive technology. However, it
had a couple of terrible performance problems. The SQL
that PeopleTools generated for a List box performed poorly,
so PeopleTools was hacked to create an index on every
column in the list box (the # index). Also, the optimizer
steadfastly refused to use the single-column indexes that
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