The latest round of upheavals at the ever-unstable company permitting (CI No 2,142), the beginning of May, operating system-cum-database Advanced Pick will finally slide off the fence and land on the database side. In a flurry of announcements that the company plans to make this year, Advanced Pick Version 6.0 will be the first release to become really intimate with the Unix operating system. In later releases this year, the company will address other shortcomings by providing SQL access to the database and a graphical user interface. Versions for Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT and IBM Corp’s OS/2 2.0 are also in the pipeline, as are new releases of native Pick and Pick for MD-DOS. Pick Systems Inc has recognised for some time that it will have to concentrate on the database side of Pick’s personality in order to survive, but currently only around 40% of sales comes from Pick for Unix, with a few percent going to the MD-DOS implementation and the native Intel Corp iAPX-86 implementation accounting for the biggest part of the business.
Frenzy
The new announcements, the product of an apparent frenzy of development work at the Irvine, California company, aim to change that. First off, the company has addressed the question of performance. One of Pick’s little idiosyncrasies is that database applications are written in Pick Basic, a superset of the programming language rather out of favour with most business programmers. Leaving aside any general perceptions of Basic, the Pick version was interpreted rather than compiled and consequently didn’t sparkle in speed bench tests. Version 6 will replace Pick Basic with ‘Flash Basic’, a compiled version of the language. In fact, it will be compiled twice, says international sales director Greg Shandell. The first pass produces C code, the second pass results in machine code and bench tests two or three times faster than the previous version. The two-stage compiler raises the intriguing possibility of gaining a direct C interface into Pick, but the company is adamant that the use of C rather than Flash Basic would be not only difficult, but also really naughty: that is not the intention said one company official, adding we only mention the C interim step so that people can understand what is going on – at least until, version 6.1 – of which, more later. Going all the way to machine code may speed things up, but in the process it has added to Pick Systems’ implementation headaches.
By Chris Rose
Previously Advanced Pick has sat aloof, on top of Unix, but now the code has been designed to take better advantage of some Unix facilities, and different versions will be needed for different processors. Nonetheless, Shandell says that by the end of August the company will have versions for most versions of Unix, by which he means implementations for Unix System V.4, and Motorola Inc’s 88open standard plus versions for Santa Cruz Operation Inc, Data General Corp, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and ICL Plc Unixes and IBM’s AIX. The Data General, Santa Cruz, 88open and RS/6000 versions will appear first, around the end of April, with ICL following around the middle of the year. And look out for an OS/2 and a Windows NT implementation too. Version 6.0 of Pick will not have a very long life, however – by the summer, versions 6.1 will be in beta test. This will, for the first time, enable outside, SQL users to interrogate Pick Databases, making it a more acceptable part of an enterprise computing strategy. In similar vein, a new set of application programming interfaces and library programs will let C programmers call the Pick system for the first time: until now, Pick programmers could get out to C, but C programmers could not get in. Finally it will be bundled with a Windows-based graphical client, something that Pick has long shied away from, but which it now accepts that is on a number of users’ ‘tick-boxes’. 6.1 is the first product to spring from the company’s Moscow operation where about 65 staff are unexpectedly housed in offices in the Olympic stadium. As with a number of
other computer companies, Pick has discovered that there are brains to be hired that previously worked in academia, the military, government and even the KGB. It is a mix of staff, says Shandell, which also helps get things done when dealing with ministerial bureaucracy. Back at the products, version 6.2 should be entering beta test by the end of the year and, for the first time, Pick should become properly aware of networks and usable across distributed systems. With more and more database engines sitting on networked servers, it has been a long time coming – the tricky bit, says Shandell is implementing remote queue pointers. Queue pointers are one of the features beloved by Pick aficionados, enabling one database entry to point to another so that the entry in a particular field is actually supplied via a link from another database. A remote queue pointer extends this process so that the supplying database can be situated on another machine on the network.
Idiosyncratic
But perhaps the best example of Picks System’s idiosyncratic development style is happening in the MD-DOS world, where the company is beta-testing multi-user Pick for MD-DOS – to be released later this year. This looks like a rather odd product there is already multi-user native Pick for the personal computer, and there is single-user Pick for MD-DOS, so is there a market for a version of Pick that will support multiple users, while a person sits on the server and uses MS-DOS? Shandell admits that he is not sure – what happened, he says, is that one of the company’s distributors developed a facsimile board for Pick for MD-DOS and requested serial-port support. Pick Systems delivered, and realised in the process that the serial-port support could equally well be used to support dumb terminals. So the company developed it as a product and we’ll see who buys it, says Shandell – but then Dick Pick’s company has always been a bit like that.
