Thunderbird 3 is a pain in the neck

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Chan Chung Hang Christopher
<christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:

> So foxpro did not get an sql language layered on top and the thing is
> direct access.

Plain old FoxPro was a dBase-compatible database, but after the MS
acquisition, Visual FoxPro did get SQL, yes. It didn't get enhanced
much, though - the main reason for the acquisition was for MS to get
its hands on Fox's Rushmore DB-query acceleration technology. This is
what saved the internal MS DB "Cirrus" from the scrapheap, IIRC - it
eventually became MS Access.

SQL Server, OTOH, was derived from Sybase's product of the same name,
under a licensing agreement that Sybase were fools to sign - they
handed MS the crown jewels, the source code for a complete SQL RDBMS.
MS "just" wanted the Windows rights. It got them, and now MS SQL
Server is one of the world's leading RDBMSes and Sybase is nowhere.

JOOI: Exchange Server uses a heavily-modified embedded version of the
MS Access Jet database as its storage engine. Even after all these
years, MS has not managed to move Exchange Server over onto SQL Server
storage. This is responsible for a lot of the limitations of Exchange
Server. MS has turned a problem into an opportunity, though - as Jet
struggles with DBs of over 2GB and then later 16GB and so on, well,
the unenhanced version is the standard Exchange licence, and you pay
$lots more for the version with the Jet DB tweaked for >16GB or
whatever: the "Enterprise Edition".


>I am surprised that, if it never got beyond this, it
> actually managed to get into 'enterprise' solutions. Or so I read on the
> Net anyway. Been a while since I last touched Visual Dbase 5.5 but I
> cannot imagine that being 'enterprise' class...

FSVO "enterprise", at least, 10-15y ago.

> OE has a file for each mailbox. I am afraid that it is not at all like
> the Exchange mail store and so there is a chance that it is foxpro-based.

I've never heard this before, but it's possible. FoxPro was famed for
its speed; so, remarkably enough, was Outlook Express, and MS Internet
Mail & News before it. (For many years, the OE binary was still called
MSIMN.EXE.)

The "Outlook" part of the name was just a branding exercise, trading
on awareness of the corporate client. There is no relationship between
them in the code. (Compare: "Javascript" vs "Java" - no relation.)

It could be that the MS Internet team - which used to be quite
separate from anyone else - wrote MSIMN using FoxPro, or at least,
part of it using FoxPro. I've just never heard previously that this
was so.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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