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Downsizing: A Review of the Enabling Technologies
Source: American Programmer Published: Aug 1991
By the summer of 1991, the idea of moving applications from mainframe computers to PC/LANs was starting to take hold. DCI’s Downsizing Expo and Conference played a major role in providing explanations and expertise to companies making this move. This article by George Schussel, appearing in the influential newspaper, American Programmer, discussed IT downsizing technologies. More than most other IT technologies, downsizing had the reality, immediacy, and statistics to be a “silver bullet”. Major benefits, from cost reduction to faster systems development and better running delivered systems, were realized by using downsizing techniques.
Client/Server computing was an important element in the downsizing movement, and offered a whole series of important user benefits which the article covered.
- Developers could use PCs instead of time-share terminals as a primary development platform.
- Even though the PC was used as the principal computing platform, security, integrity, and recovery capability comparable to minicomputers was the result.
- The efficiency of queries was optimized through use of the SQL language, greatly reducing the network communication load.
- Gateway technologies allowed PC users to gain access to data located in mainframe and rninicomputer DBMS products such as DB2, IMS, and Rdb.
- The client/server model isolated the data from the applications program in the design stage. This allowed a greater amount of flexibility in managing and expanding the database and also in adding new programs at the application level.
- The client/server model was very scalable because, as requirements for more processing come up, more servers could be added in the network, or servers could be traded up to the latest generation of microprocessor.
- A lot of flexibility came from a computing environment based on SQL, because SQL had been almost universally adopted as a standard. Commitment to an SQL server engine meant that most front-end 4GL, spreadsheet, word processing, and graphics tools would interface cleanly to the SQL engine.
- Client/server computing provided the robust security, integrity, and database capabilities of minicomputer or mainframe architectures while allowing companies to build and run their applications on PC and minicomputer networks. This hardware/software combination often cut 90 percent of the costs of the hardware/software environment for building “industrial- strength” applications.
Download the entire article for a comprehensive overview.
