PowerHouse (programming language)

PowerHouse is a trademarked name for a family of byte-compiled programming languages originally produced for the HP3000 mini-computer built by Hewlett-Packard Corporation. It comprised three products, Quiz - a report writer, Quick - an interactive character based screen generator, and QTP - a batch transaction processor, all dependent upon a central Data Dictionary, QDD and later PDL. The company that developed and marketed these products is now called Cognos Corporation.

PowerHouse was introduced in 1982 by Quasar Corporation and bundled together Quiz and Quick, both of which had been previously available separately, with a new batch processor QTP, now sold as a single product. In 1983, Quasar changed its name to Cognos Corporation and began porting their application development tools to other platforms, notably the IBM series 400 (later rebranded as the AS/400). They also began extending their product line with add-ons to PowerHouse (Architect) and end-user applications written in PowerHouse (MultiView).

An early move to the Intel platform in 1988 (PowerHouse PC) proved abortive. Nonetheless, Cognos eventually produced Axiant (c.1995), which effectively ported PowerHouse-like syntax to an Intel based MS-Windows style visual development enviroment and linked it to SQL aware DBMS running on these machines. On the mid-range systems attempts to extend the useful life of PowerHouse in an age of web-aware applications led to the development of PowerHouse Web (c. 1999).

In its day PowerHouse represented a considerable achivement. Compared with languages like Cobol, Pascal and PL/1, PowerHouse substantially cut the amount of labour required to produce useful applications on its choosen platforms. It achived this through the features provided by a central data-dictionary, a compiled file that extended the attributes of data fields available in native DBMS with freqently used programming idioms such as display masks, help and message strings, range and pattern checks, help and information texts. To accomplish this PowerHouse was tightly coupled by design to the underlying database management system that predominated on each of the target platforms. In the case of the HP3000 this was the Image shallow-network DBMS and the entire language reflected its origins.

However, even at its introduction and throughout its life, PowerHouse was not without its detractors. Like all virtual machine languages, PowerHouse had an extraordinary appetite for CPU cycles. On machines that usually ran at speeds considerably less than 40GHz this commonly produced a visibly negative impact on overall transaction performance, frequently necessitating hardware upgrades of considerable expense. It did not endear PowerHouse to its users that this expense was usually exacerbated by Cognos' own voracious appetite for licence fees tied to hardware performance metrics.

Regardless, PowerHouse was eventually ovetaken by events. 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, and PowerHouse was very high priced, became a hard sell. Although PowerHouse is still available and continues to receive occasional minor updates, by 1999 Cognos had all but ceased further development of PowerHouse on mid-range computers in favour of newer product lines. Products like Business Intellegence and Axiant that run on commodity architectures as well as high-end Unix servers and now form the core of Cognos Corporation's business.