The Anchovy Pizza Company – Not!
Imagine an Anchovy Pizza Company that is famous for its great pizzas. However, since every pie they make includes anchovies among the toppings, its customers are naturally limited to those who are enthusiastic fans of anchovies and those who, while they may not especially care for anchovies, have found a combination of toppings including anchovies that blend well together to give them pizza they enjoy.1
As discussed in our blog post The Heritage and Legacy of M (MUMPS) – and the Future of YottaDB, MUMPS is both a procedural programming language and a NoSQL database. YottaDB’s upstream GT.M code base is like the Anchovy Pizza Company in that the MUMPS programming language and the MUMPS database are inseparably integrated. Although it is possible to access the database from any language that can make C-compatible function calls, such access requires a small API to be created in MUMPS as a software shim, which application code in the other language must call. The anchovy lovers who frequent the Anchovy Pizza Company2 are those already programming in MUMPS, and those who have found a combination of toppings to love have applications programmed in a high level language that compiles into MUMPS for execution.
We make the same great pizzas as the Anchovy Pizza Company – indeed, more than half our number made pizzas there, and each member of our original team made anchovy pizzas for over twenty years. But there is an important difference: you can have any topping you want on our pies. If you love anchovies, we make the best anchovy pizzas, but if you don’t care for anchovies, or you are a vegetarian, we will make you a great pie with your choice of topping.
In r1.20, YottaDB created a native C API that is tightly bound to the database. In r1.24, we extended that API to support multi-threaded applications, and followed up with a Go API. In the not-too-distant future, we hope to add support for Rust as well as beyond that to popular languages such as Python. SQL? It’s coming. David Wicksell has released nodem which is node.js API. JSON? JDS-GTM has it3. A Perl extension for accessing YottaDB has been created by Stefan Traby. All these APIs are toppings for the great database pizzas we make.
Chocolate chip & dill pickle topping? Sure, if our customers want it, we’ll bake it!
[1]. For readers outside the United States who may not be familiar with the idea, anchovies as a pizza topping have enthusiastic fans as well as those who vehemently dislike it. Anchovies on pizza generate passion, with a small minority in the middle.↩
[2]. As well as similar pizza companies that also include anchovies, but are not as forthright about it.↩
[3]. Thanks to Christopher Edwards.↩
Images used:
[1] By Etrusko25 – Own work Foto di Alessandro Duci, Photo taken in Liguria, Italy
[2] Amazing Pizza, David Adam Kess
[3] Photo by Fancycrave.com from Pexels
Published on April 22, 2019