Re: OpenQM on Intel Mac

Hi Tony,

Can you put this in a bigger picture for us non-Mac types?
What does this mean for traditional server-oriented MV apps?
What sort of market is out there for Mac-based servers?

It's a big unknown. We had a query from a Mac user about two years ago
asking if QM was available. Sadly, the answer was no and they went
away. Given that we had a Mac in-house, it seemed like a good thing to
go and try. As is so often the case with QM, the migration was done in
under a day. So why didn't we release it much earlier?....

The Mac is even more of a GUI engine than a Windows box. Oddly,
Windows users expect sometimes to be asked to open a DOS command
prompt window and type a few mysterious commands. Some even understand
what they are doing. Mac users, on the other hand, expect to do
everything with a mouse click. Unfortunately, the documentation for
how to write a GUI installer for Mac was (and still is) a bit vague.
We had several offers of help from people who claimed to know how to
do it but they all gave up along the way. Finally, at the 2007
Spectrum show, we gave in and released QM with a nasty text mode
installer.

Then, along came the Intel Mac. Should be easy, we thought. Oh no it
wasn't!

Once again, migrating QM took under a day. It was the installer that
caused all the troubles (and we still haven't got a GUI one). Gone are
the days of configuring networks with a simple eight line inetd config
file. Now you have to create a complex XML script and run commands
that probably just turn it into an eight line inetd config file.

If that wasn't bad enough, we then found that the Intel Mac only
supports PAM user authentication which is so badly documented that it
took a very long time and some external help (for which we are very
grateful) to get it to work. This was a useful development to do
anyway as we have some other platforms running here but as yet
unreleased that need PAM.

So, back to your questions. What does it mean for the mv user base?

Macs do seem to be on the increase. Perhaps the horrors of Vista are
partly the cause. I saw a great photo a few days ago of someone from
Microsoft delivering a presentation using a Mac.

There are database offering for Macs but, as far as we know, we are
the only mv database on this platform. Could this be another way that
we can live up to our slogan of "taking multivalue where it has never
been before"? Hopefully, someone will develop applications for the Mac
or, perhaps, simply port existing applications from Windows.
Personally, I see this as opening another possible market for mv. What
it now needs is someone with an application to see this new market.

Alhough we mostly think of laptops when anyone mentions Macs, there
are servers too. We have a dealer actively working on creating a big
application of a Mac server.


Is the following link a place to start for info:?http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Note recent related info:http://www.macworld.com/article/133787/2008/06/osx106.html?t=101

I took a look at this and didn't see anything particularly relevant to
mv. Did I miss something?


Do you have a vision for getting more MV apps out in the world to
support more, but smaller systems?  For example, are you positioning
QM/OSX86 as a workstation database like MSDE, SQLite, Access, etc?

QM was originally aimed at small office systems, perhaps up to a dozen
users. We quickly realised that we could go very much higher and have
tested with 1000 users. At the other end, we are equally happy with
single user systems. The PDA is a perfect example of this where our
very small footprint allows us to go where other products could not
run.

We would love to work with a high volume, single user application
vendor to get QM on vast numbers of systems but we see our market as
exending all the way from the single user systems to big corporate
servers.


About the time D3NT was being conceived, I suggested to Pick Systems
management that they create a fast-installing D3Lite, with no compiler
or TCL, just a runtime engine that can serve as an embedded database.

QM was originally written (back in 1993) as an embedded database. The
features needed for wider usage came later, mainly because we adopted
it to run our own business systems. It was then a natural progression
to release it as a fully functional mv database product. There have
been all sorts of odd uses suggested along the way including as a
scripting engine, a Linux shell and even as a complete replacement for
Apache.

We looked seriously at providing a DLL or C library that provided the
file system but without a command language, Basic engine, etc.
Unfortunately, you soon discover that this doesn't work. Once you have
the file system, you want I-types, triggers and the query processor.
This implies that you have the compiler. That, in turn needs other
bits and very rapidly you are back to the full product.

My biggest problem with all of the MV environments is that they are
fairly invasive, with components in Program Files, registry, /usr/bin,
and other areas.

We try not to do this. Contrary to Microsoft's desire for everyone to
load up the registry, we have stayed with the older .ini files. This
is partly because we still have users on Windows systems that pre-date
the registry but experience suggests that having a non-registry based
config file is a better idea.

Originally, the Linux implementation kept the configuration data in
the QMSYS directory. It was suggested that we moved this to /etc,
which we did although we are now thinking of moving it back.

Our aim is not to install items in "system" areas, something that
proved important to the self-contained USB stick system we were giving
away at Spectrum.


If anyone wants to load MV as the DBMS handler for some consumer
product then we can't be paying $100+ just for the DBMS.

We have some big discounts available for high volume, single user
licences that would make this practical. So far, no one has come up
with the application.


Martin Phillips, Ladybridge Systems.
.

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