The Prevayling Attitude

by Charles Miller on March 19, 2003

I've been meaning to write an article about why I'm discouraged from using Prevayler by the over-blown and annoying hype of its supporters, but Alan has beaten me to it.

What follows is the half-baked rant that would otherwise have been cooked into a real article, had Alan not already said everything I was going to say.

Essentially, I'm sure that Prevayler is a good thing, and solves a particular problem very well, but I'm put on my guard by the fact that I can't find any critical coverage of it. And by critical, I mean articles that say “These are the good things it did for me. This is where I had problems. This is a situation in which it sucked.”. On the Prevayler site, I just get admonishments that whatever my storage requirements, memory technology will speed up to cover them. (Sure. And in the DB2 magazine I glanced through last time I visited the office, there's an article on the new generation of Petabyte databases)

I see declarations in the Prevalence Skeptical FAQ that 25GB of RAM will just cost me $3000, without mentioning the six- to seven-figure hardware I'd have to buy to host that much memory efficiently.

Give me a break.

Even better, give me some balanced, critical commentary that doesn't sound like zealotry.

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