Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!cimshop!davidm From: cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: Britton Lee's SQL Server: Anyone using it? Message-ID: Date: 23 Jul 90 07:27:57 GMT References: <1990Jul15.052332.18910@comspec.uucp> <463@newave.UUCP> Sender: davidm@cimshop.UUCP Distribution: comp Organization: Consilium Inc., Mountain View, California. Lines: 42 In-reply-to: john@newave.UUCP's message of 20 Jul 90 02:24:21 GMT In article <463@newave.UUCP> john@newave.UUCP (John A. Weeks III) writes: The major problem with Britton Lee is Mr. Britton Lee...according to people that I know that used to work for him. Mr Lee is very smart, but he sometimes insists on doing things the wrong way. The fact that Britton Lee attempted to create a new database language standard (even though SQL is fast catching on in the corporate database area) ended up setting Britton Lee back quite a bit. Up until this point, I pretty much agreed with your article. Its been awhile since I worked with Britton-Lee machines, so I can't really say one way or the other how well they are doing in their current incarnation. The early machines, though, were often rather touchy. There never was a Mr. Britton Lee. The original chiefs of Britton-Lee (I think their titles were Chairman and President) were Mr. David Britton and Mr. Richard Lee. I met both of them early on in the development and marketting of the Britton-Lee 500s (my group was an early customer). They left Britton-Lee about 3 or 4 years ago while the company was going through some hard times. They were felt to be good at leading a startup company, but had trouble pushing it over into a growing company. Actually, I believe the chief architect of the BL-500s was the same person who designed much of the Sybase architecture and is the Executive Vice President of Sybase (Dr. Bob Epstein). Before Britton-Lee, Dr. Epstein was a major player in the development of University Ingres. He left Britton-Lee because he came to feel that a startup company could not compete with big hardware vendors in turning out specialized database hardware that would compete with general hardware with good database software for very long (and I agree with this). So, Britton-Lee had some good talent in development early on. As to language standards, the Britton-Lee internal language is a derivative of the Quel language that Ingres used. Also, the first BL systems came out before there was an "SQL standard" and when there was still hope that the standard would be the better Quel derivative. That the world went to SQL did hurt Britton-Lee (and, I think, RTI, but they recovered better), though. -- =================================================================== David Masterson Consilium, Inc. uunet!cimshop!davidm Mt. View, CA 94043 =================================================================== "If someone thinks they know what I said, then I didn't say it!"