Informix Users Conference

Well, I was at the conference and here is a very quick summary of what I saw.... 1) Informix doesn't seem to be very excited about windows NT. The first discussion talk of the day was by Phil White (ceo of Informix) and Mike Maples (microsoft VP), and talked about the impact of NT on the computing environment as a whole. 2) The sessions covered were interesting, but a lot of the time they seemed to be directed from a marketing point of view. The sessions really could have been a lot more technical, but hey, it's just the second conference they have had. 3) On the following day, there was a round table discussion about NT and OO by some guys Informix selected. I forget the names, but my god, they are very hostile toward NT. And this seems to fit the Informix point of view. My impression from informix was that NT will go away, and they seem to be betting the farm. Unix seems to be the commitment, and UNIX only. Sure Informix will play around with NT and offer the SE, but Online isn't supposed to be around until late 94 or early 95. This gives me the idea they want to see what happens, while Oracle and Sybase are porting their stuff already. 4) The food was okay, but seemed to be a little on the bland side. The first days lunch was cold, and they kinda ran out. The second day was a little better, but still was a little unorganized. 5) Interoperatibility between databases is a non-issue. Literally every demo I saw in the booth sections was designed to communicate with at least 10 or more databases. So you can now keep which ever database engine you want, and use these utilities to create the form drivers. 6) Sequent had several machines, and seemed to be a real power house. I guess the strategic agreements Informix and Sequent have signed has payed off. Informix must have mentioned them at least in every session. 7) The technical ability of the Informix people doing the demos was kinda low. I was trying to get some decent information, but the general answer I got was pretty lame. Mind you, I port all the Informix products to our hardware platform, so I was asking more technical things than they might have expected. 8) The Informix 6.0 release will be one hell of a release, but expect a signifigant price increase. They will be wrapping the networking tools into the engine as a bundled product, so you will undoubtably have to pay for it. 9) Informix Online 6.0 sounds like a very good product. It seems to really address the tape and backup utilities everyone has been complaining about for years, but they might be anticipating customer response wrong. I kinda got the impression it will cost a lot to get the upgrade. 10) In addition the 6.0 online engine is going to use it's own threader, instead of the os threader. Hmmmmm, this might be a problem. 11) I did like to work they did on the manuals. It was nice. All the sessions had all the slides preprinted and in a binder for pickup before the conference even started. I guess that's a lot of the stuff they did. One thing I found a little frustrating was... A lot of the speakers were not native english speaking. Mind you, I'm not getting down on foreigners (god forbid, it's not politically correct anyway 8-), but a good grasp of the english language would be nice if you plan to talk in front of an english speaking audience. I might post some more, but for now that's it. If you have specific questions please email me personally. Ken -- ___________________________________________________________________________ | Ken Hovanes | | | Intergraph Corp. | I prefer Hostess Fruit Pies, to | | (205) 730-3781 | Pop-Tarts because they | | khovanes@crackers.b30.ingr.com | don't require so much cooking. | | or khovanes@ingr.com | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------