PowerHouse

PowerHouse is 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, as well as Data General and DEC VAX/VMS systems. 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 VMS, Data General's AOS/VS II, and IBM's OS/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). 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.