An APL Banking Application
Vector 3:1, page 65
Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 65
Technical Meeting: Managing APLers, 21st March 1986¶
An APL Banking Application¶
Per Hultin (APL Software Technology)
This talk concentrated on the value of a relational approach to data, and of end-user involvement in the system design. The banking system he outlined was (in any terms) big:
- 8,000 accounts, with ½ million transactions per quarter
- 967,000 records in the database
- 31 files/relations with 258 attributes
- 300 Mbytes of storage.
To some extent the development was trapped in APL because the volumes quoted were much lower! Once committed it was cheaper to buy a bigger CPU than to rewrite in COBOL!
Exercise: “ANZAC Provident Loans”¶
Nic’s comments (unexpurgated) were:
“Quite good fun, got people discussing things – but some cliques didn’t want to play!”
I don’t know who thought this up, but it was obviously a good idea. Issues like profit potential, data accuracy, machine capacity, timescales and division of work were well brought out. Should you prototype? Without one you can’t get off the ground, but it could lead you into an oversimplified design.
APL System Design¶
Romilly Cocking (Cocking and Drury)
This was basically a justification for, and potted version of, the C&D System Design course. I hope Romilly can be talked into writing this up in full; there is far too much material for me to have any hope of doing it justice here.
“Just telling us again to do what we know we should do, but usually don’t.”
. . . was Nic’s parting shot on the day.