PowerHouse (programming language)
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PowerHouse is a trademarked name for a byte-compiled fourth-generation programming language (or 4GL) originally produced by Quasar Corporation (later renamed Cognos Incorporated) for the Hewlett-Packard HP3000 mini-computer. It was initially composed of five components:
- QDD, or Quasar Data Dictionary: for building a central data dictionary used by all other components
- QDesign: a character-based screen generator
- Quick: an interactive, character-based screen processor (running screens generated by QDesign)
- Quiz: a report writer
- QTP: a batch transaction processor.
History
PowerHouse was introduced in 1982 and bundled together in a single product Quiz and Quick/QDesign, both of which had been previously available separately, with a new batch processor QTP. In 1983, Quasar changed its name to Cognos Corporation and began porting their application development tools to other platforms, notably Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX, Data General's Eclipse MV, and IBM's AS/400, along with the UNIX platforms from these vendors. Cognos also began extending their product line with add-ons to PowerHouse (for example, Architect) and end-user applications written in PowerHouse (for example, MultiView). [citation needed] Subsequent development of the product added support for platform-specific relational databases, such as HP's Allbase/SQL, DEC's Rdb, and Microsoft's SQL Server, as well as cross-platform relational databases such as Oracle, Sybase, and IBM's DB2.
The PowerHouse language represented a considerable achievement. Compared with languages like Cobol, Pascal and PL/1, PowerHouse substantially cut the amount of labour required to produce useful applications on its chosen platforms. It achieved this through the use of a central data-dictionary, a compiled file that extended the attributes of data fields natively available in the DBMS with frequently used programming idioms such as:
- display masks
- help and message strings
- range and pattern checks
- help and information texts.
In order to support the data dictionary PowerHouse was tightly coupled to the underlying database management system and/or file system on each of the target platforms. In the case of the HP3000 this was the IMAGE shallow-network DBMS and KSAM indexed file system, and the entire PowerHouse language reflected its origins.
Like all virtual machine languages PowerHouse is CPU intensive.[citation needed] This sometimes produced a visibly negative impact on overall transaction performance necessitating hardware upgrades. Cognos practice of tying license fees to hardware performance metrics resulted in high licensing costs for PowerHouse users.[citation needed]
Migration to the PC
Cognos initially attempted to move to the Intel platform in 1988 with the DOS-based PowerHouse PC. While the product was used by numerous partners to build bespoke applications for small to medium sized customers it was not entirely unsuccessful at that time. However, Cognos eventually produced Axiant (c.1995), which ported PowerHouse-like syntax to an Intel-based Microsoft Windows visual development environment and linked it to SQL aware DBMS running on these machines. The radical changes wrought by the PC revolution, which began just at the time PowerHouse was introduced, eventually brought down the cost of host computers to such an extent that high-priced software development tools such as PowerHouse became unattractive to customers.[citation needed]
PowerHouse in the 21st Century
Although PowerHouse is still available and continues to receive occasional minor functional and platform conformance updates, by 1999 Cognos had all but ceased major development of PowerHouse on mid-range computers in favour of newer product lines. Around 1999 PowerHouse Web was released in order to support the development of web-aware applications.[citation needed] Products like Business Intelligence and Financial Performance Management that run on commodity architectures and high-end UNIX servers now form the core of the Cognos product line.
Cognos was acquired by IBM on January 30, 2008, and continues to support the PowerHouse line of products.