A lot will change in V6R1, and perhaps the biggest change will be in the way you pay for your development tools.

By Joe Pluta

Welcome to the brave new world. The old tier-based model that we have been used to and that IBM was actually moving us toward in recent releases is now gone. Instead, IBM has wholly embraced the user-based pricing model rampant in the industry, even though there's not even a consensus on what constitutes a user (I'll get into that a little bit more a little later).

Why do so many applications perform so poorly? And what can be done to change that?

Testing applications for performance and scalability has become an afterthought in the software development community. According to Forrester Research, nearly 85 percent of large companies (more than $1 billion in revenue) have reported incidents of significant application performance problems. Why is this is happening? How can we improve this state of affairs?

Let's take both a practical and theoretical look at three of today's most primitive data structures.

Weren't algorithms and data structures and their relatives your favorite engineering-related courses? For many of us, probably not! These were typically the "right of passage" courses in most computer science and engineering programs. That is, once you passed these courses, you were officially part of the program.

Unfortunately, the theory surrounding these "primitive" data structures can be among the first topics to escape our minds. This article aims to refresh the minds of both the experienced practitioner and the fresh graduate about some of the theory behind the data structures that we frequently use. I'll also offer some examples of where such structures may be found in the real world.

Let's take both a practical and theoretical look at three of today's most primitive data structures.

Weren't algorithms and data structures and their relatives your favorite engineering-related courses? For many of us, probably not! These were typically the "right of passage" courses in most computer science and engineering programs. That is, once you passed these courses, you were officially part of the program.

Unfortunately, the theory surrounding these "primitive" data structures can be among the first topics to escape our minds. This article aims to refresh the minds of both the experienced practitioner and the fresh graduate about some of the theory behind the data structures that we frequently use. I'll also offer some examples of where such structures may be found in the real world.