Recently I had occasion to take a quick look at MUMPS. I remembered the name from my undergraduate days, but not what it was about – some database thing? Yeah. It’s a database with integrated language,
developed in the 1960s.
MUMPS-the-language seems archaic. MUMPS-the-database is a NoSQL database from before RDBMS was invented, capable of handling big data since before big data was a thing. Systems based on and evolved from it implement enormous health care records and financial systems, and have been doing it for a long time. And it looks like one can now use the database without having to (directly) use the language.
And because testing is what I do, that led me to think a bit about testing that kind of system. It would be a different domain from the carrier-grade telecoms systems I’ve been working with, but there would be some commonalities, particularly the importance of stress testing and negative scenarios, and I’m sure there there would be elusive intermittent bugs to hunt. I’m used to the idea that “this causes a crash once in umpteen gazillion times? that means it happens 3 times a week, so find it!”. I could get into that.