The Weird OS Built Around a Database [video]

I knew this would be PICK.

My uncle, a very tech-savvy accountant type, used it a lot back in the day and always had nice things to say about it.

IBM i (nee AS/400) also uses a database for its lower layers, and even though it isn't that common, database systems like MS SQL Server and Oracle can also be fully used to write applications with Web UIs, e.g. APEX, or mapping Web API endpoints to stored procedures.

They can also make use of raw partitions, thus having a server that is all about the RDMS and nothing else.

And PICK is still kind of around! Today the “multi value” database torch is in the hands of Rocket Software, which licenses it as “UniData” and “UniVerse”. Most of the logic for the higher ed ERP software Colleague relies on the BASIC flavor “UniBasic”, which is heavily tied to the MV database, for application logic.

I hadn't heard of this before and found it really interesting and entertaining. This reminds me of the Ediacaran and Cambrian critters... where one looks at fossils of things like Hallucigenia and marvels at the different paths that evolution could've taken.

The video called me out when it mentioned that the query language might seem scary or dirty to some of us - and it does! My eyelid twitched when I saw the example on screen - but it's still really interesting to me to think about a database as the source of the OS primitives, rather than an application running within a more standard OS and using the OS's conceptual framing.

I would have thought it would be about OS/400.

I usually don't watch videos, but this one captured my attention.

I think something like this built around something like Datomic as an immutable database would be awesome.

Created by Dick Pick, no less.