Re: (not entirely...) OT: OPINION... chicken entrails, runic stones, and crystal balls... WAS CoBOL moved to OO

From: Doug Scott (dwscott_at_ieee.org)
Date: 01/03/04 

Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 13:23:07 GMT

Peter,

> The objections raised here have studiously avoided (or maybe not seen) the
> post I made that says transactions can be scheduled whenever you want them
> scheduled (in addition to mirroring random events as they happen).

Well, I thought it was obviously true that a transaction could /initiate/ a
batch process at any time, and it could be scheduled.

Peter, I've been working with this mechanism for over ten years. There are
several other mechanisms which you need to put into place - dynamic
prioritisation, feedback to the users saying "This will take ten hours to
produce - do you really want this report?" And so on. And it's bull*** to
say that batch processes will at some future date run on zero time; it all
takes time and resources.

That enquiry system used to be given to the users as part of normal systems
support - it saved writing reports and got them out of our hair. A change in
IT management decided to charge the users for them, and all hell broke loose
when they received bills for thousands of pounds because they were
initiating reports in peak time. They could have done them overnight, but
they insisted that they wanted them *now* and they didn't want to pay for
them. The particular report I'm thinking of only reported end of day figures
anyway (because of mail delivery), so it was a nonsense to do it in real
time.

> The only problem is that (at the moment) the
> technology is not quite powerful enough to ensure that ALL transactions
> (both random and scheduled) are processed immediately.

Twas ever thus. 

---
Doug
dwscott@ieee.org