Cock-ups, INFORMIX for VMS, and VMS 5.4

Path: emory!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!ariel!ucsvc.ucs.unimelb.edu.au!wehi.edu.au!tony From: tony@wehi.edu.au Newsgroups: comp.os.vms,comp.databases,comp.databases.informix Message-ID: <1991Oct3.184243.24703@wehi.edu.au> Date: 3 Oct 91 18:42:43 GMT Organization: Walter & Eliza Hall Institute HELP!!! We are a VAX/VMS site and have been running INFORMIX for VMS. Unfortunately we only found out a couple of months ago that INFORMIX announced the death of INFORMIX for VMS in March 1990 with support completely drying up in March 1991. This is even despite us being a maintenance customer of INFORMIX Australia. We only found out in May/June this year when we rang to see why we had not received our renewal notice, and to make an enquiry about INFORMIX. Some maintenance! It appears the rep (who no longer works for INFORMIX) processed our maintenence payment in March 1990 as a sale rather than a maintenance contract hence we never received the missive about the death of INFORMIX for VMS. Our only other contact with INFORMIX in the maintenance period was in July 1990 to enquire whether INFORMIX would cope with our upgrade to VMS version 5.2/5.3. The same rep confirmed that it would and started to go on about how the next release due late in 1990 that would make use of the inbuilt Rdb engine in VMS - no suggestion of the death of the product line! The only compensation offered to date by INFORMIX for this cock up is free transition to Ultrix - a REAL world option - just drop all VMS systems folks just because one supplier drops the ball!! All our Unix system are dedicated to other tasks. Anyway, my problems now are that I need to transfer to another VMS based relational database, and fork out some money. We are considering our options at present. However this conversion will take time and money for code conversion. However, I come back to my enquiry I was going to ask INFORMIX when I contacted then a few months ago. Will the last release of INFORMIX for VMS cope with the upgrade to VMS 5.4 - I now desparately need to introduce this upgrade for other medical science analysis and research. I cannot afford to wait until we have performed all the conversions to what ever product we buy. Is there anyone in the world who ran to VMS 5.4 with INFORMIX before it was pulled?? INFORMIX will not answer this question for me!! Options such as rolling upgrades are not really feasible as I do not have a node to spare, and I cannot afford to store two versions of VMS. And with the cost of the database replacement (my budget is now shot for the next year or so), I cannot afford to buy another box to run VMS 5.3 til we convert, or Unix/Ultrix and use INFORMIX under some flavour of Unix. Anyway a decent amount of the interface code is written in C using SMG calls - not much use in the Unix world, even Ultrix! And spending a weekend upgrading a seven node cluster to VMS 5.4 and then finding out it does not work and having to restore VMS 5.3 is not my idea of fun!! I would be eternally gratefull if any one can come up with an answer to the query arrived at from experience. Regards, Tony Kyne Head, Computer Sciences The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Melbourne, Australia. tony@wehi.edu.au PS: Naturally, I and all the computing professionals around here are now sworn off INFORMIX and its total product line for life!