Still waiting for NSFDB2?
by Volker Weber
Cristian writes a long story about waiting for Godot NSFDB2. We know the history of how it should become available "in the next major release". This release is now going to be shipped next month. Now it looks like nsfdb2 is not going to be supported on the iSeries. Cristian and his customer are not amused.
My take on this NSFDB2 thing is very different from the official story. It is my opinion only, so take it with a grain pound of salt:
NSFDB2 was born when Mills was dreaming about having only one directory, one database, one development environment, one application server. Domino was going to be modularized and put on the WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational pillars; DB2 was going to replace NSF.
As it turned out, NSF is much faster at doing what it does than DB2. Actually DB2 was not well suited to store notes. Only years later, when DB2 learned to properly deal with XML, it would have been able to replace NSF. But the architecture conceived in the meantime for NSFDB2 does not even exploit those capabilities.
What we now have is a child so ugly that only its mother can love it.
Comments
Mr. Mills is still there so I hope you get the chance for another interview anytime soon. I still miss an integrated lightweight SQL engine but maybe I am just storing the wrong data within Notes.
So ugly?
I do not think so, because if the child is so ugly no one has problems with the unavailability of nsfdb2 on the iseries. I think NSFDB2 would be really a killerfeature because with db2 access views our RPG IV can use Notes Data without using the C API.
Greetings
Ralf M Petter
Have a look at Common's reaction:
COMMON NA and COMMON Europe Surveys Reveal NSFDB2 Support for i5/OS a Key Need for System i Users
http://www.common.org/pdfs/press/083007release.pdf
Its a shame they never asked the survey participants what exactly they hoped to do with DB2NSF before asking if they needed it and if they considered other solutions to meet these requirements.
