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From: dhepner@hpcuhc.cup.hp.com (Dan Hepner)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Any TUXEDO users here?
Message-ID: <2060008@hpcuhc.cup.hp.com>
Date: 21 Jan 91 18:11:37 GMT
References: <DENAP.91Jan10122420@alta.sw.stratus.com>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Lines: 41

From: dafuller@sequent.UUCP (David Fuller)

>>Since they have only begun to penetrate the market, perhaps someone will be
>>good enough to explain what they are and when they are useful? 

>The wizzened IBM or Tandem hand would claim that the assertion of "recent
>market penetration" is equivalent to "UNIX market immaturity".
>Dave Fuller				   

Great posting, Dave Fuller.

There's good reasons why TP monitors have not penetrated the
Unix market to the extent that they have penetrated the mainframe
market. It's interesting to note that several/most of the problems which
drove the original development of CICS (the most significant IBM monitor)
simply don't exist on Unix.   CICS came into being in an environment
where timesharing wouldn't be available for years to come, where
the computing paradigm was a batch job which took over the entire
computer and ran to completion, and then the next one began.  In
order to allow for OLTP, some mechanism was needed to have
a "single, perpetual batch job which interacted with lots of terminals".

In that long gone world, you got one process.  Period.  And while 
modernization has made this no longer the case, what has remained is 
an accepted axiom that processes are expensive.

Unix came along with the concept, if not always the reality, of very 
cheap processes.  Utilizing that concept, it is very easy to address the
vast majority of the problems which have been addressed by mainframe
TP monitors.  I.e. getting input from many, keeping track of the context
of each user, The wonder drug of operating systems.

Unfortunately, the concept meets reality at some number of processes.
Go over that line, and the cost of maintaining all of those usually
idle processes will consume an unacceptable percentage of your OLTP 
machine, particularly when compared to doing the same work using a
few processes.  Thus, we find that the current Unix OLTP paradigm is 
quite good so long as one only intends to address the needs of "small" 
number of users applications.

Dan Hepner