PowerHouse (programming language)

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:

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). 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:

...
Wikipedia