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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

This is a fascinating move for Progress Software, who seem to have managed decades of survival through the onslaught of SQL and MySQL/Postgres cutting into their market .. and so to see them acquiring Telerik now is really interesting. Progress were, once, one of the major players in the database space (and still are in many vertical markets) so it could really be an interesting development to see them rise again. Could be with this acquisition they are gearing up for a new era in database development...

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They survive because of vendor lockin, too many companies have years or decades of work in to using that system and it would be far too costly to move.

If your starting a project from scratch today you are not using progress, Legacy is their only business.

They know it, which is why they are buying up companies like this.

Bingo! I came across Progress first time this week in a different context (Indian startup scene) - they portray themselves as incubators here (https://www.progress.com/incubator). Have a fancy application system et al.. even stress how they don't take any equity.

Turns out in lieu of essentially a deskspace and maybe wifi they mandate the incubated startups to use their Cloud platform products - aha lockin! This is how shitty enterprises survive. When they can't find new customers, they come to India and tomtom around as evangelists & incubators and other $100 words in self-description.

Well, to be fair, Progress has had traction in India as an application environment for decades now, so it only makes sense that there be an iCloud'ification of their whole product line - all the cool kids are doing it..

I remember using the Progress database, 4GL and all, and it was a painful experience.

I remember being very surprised that in mid-2000's, it didn't automatically optimize a query like "A>B and X=Y". It ended up running A>B first, which pulled in most of a huge table, instead of running X=Y, which was much narrower. I thought it was a basic query optimization heuristic to prioritize equality constraints, so I thought it was unacceptable for an enterprise SQL database in mid-2000's to not have that.

I think in Progress' 4GL, you basically had 'the power' to use ()'s to hint at your preference. I dunno though, been a looooong time (1989) since I wrote any Progress 4GL code. Been mostly a MySQL/PostgreSQL user since then, although I confess to being more inclined to NoSQL these days .. :)

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