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Its depressingly popular in the US for small & mid-size retailers and businesses. NCR, Loc, IT Retail, et all are built for Windows, and in the pharmacy arena y
by posguy 9y ago
Its depressingly popular in the US for small & mid-size retailers and businesses. NCR, Loc, IT Retail, et all are built for Windows, and in the pharmacy arena you've got major companies like CVS using stuff from companies like Integra (not the telecom company, the pharmacy one) that thinks moving to SQL Server 2008 and C# with a full rewrite is the route to go for their major PCI compliant products.
It confounds me that locking yourself into a shrinking platform is what these players choose to do. Walmart doesn't use Windows in PCI related situations, nor do the big boys, all are on SLES running a POS atop that.
If your gonna do a rewrite, why lock yourself into one OS and into one database? Database connectors are a thing, and they aren't hard to use...
- hvidgaard 9y agoIn all fairness, writing in C# and targeting SQL Server is not locking you into Windows unless you use WPF or other Windows specific parts of the framework.
- posguy 9y agoO_o Sure, you can technically run C# on a Linux box (eg: Debian), but the last few times I had to (to interface with some point of sale hardware) I literally ended up just rewriting the driver in python. No desire to maintain something so foreign to the rest of the codebase when python can handle serial devices just fine. Wrt not using a database connector, just why? Your literally locking yourself to the SQL Server licensing model, which blows up when you allow BYOD on every android phone, and they're all connecting back to your SQL server. Postgres and MariaDB meanwhile have no issues. Let alone if you hit the 10GB DB size cap, or need more than 1 cpu core or 1GB of ram to cache your database.
- hvidgaard 9y agoAre you aware that .netcore natively runs on a variety of systems now? If you make your systems such that you are dependent on SQL Server and cannot switch it to something else, then it's just a shame, but don't blame SQL Server for that. Besides, unless you have massive performance requirements, it should be behind an API anyway. It doesn't take much to code, and it increases modularity a lot.
- taspeotis 9y agoMinor point but it's four cores now [1]. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/sql-server/sql-server-2016-editions https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/sql-server/sql-server-2016-e...
- slowmotiony 9y agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted. We use .net core together with SQL Server on Linux boxes in production, no issues whatsoever and we can finally use a programming language which is actually pleasurable to code in.
- skrowl 9y agoYou know exactly why he's getting downvoted. Saying positive things about Microsoft is very unpopular here on HN.
- saiya-jin 9y agoBecause we still suffer arrogance of various decisions of that company in past (windows breaklines, anybody?). If somebody f_cked you over bad say 15 years ago, would you be friendly to him now? Btw similar attitude can be expressed towards Facebook or Google or whatever for various reasons, but in my personal view those haven't reached the 'evil' state that MS gained in the past yet. It's hard to win trust back, and MS has a looooong way ahead even if they did some initial baby steps already. Plus some pure evil steps like forcing Windows update to Win10, and complete loss of privacy. It's really hard to like them, and theirs is the blame...
- barfbuttface 9y agoYes down votes for positive MS, and bans for negative MS.