RE: DB2, C-ISAM, SQL = confusion

> > > On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 14:23:54 -0400, Marsha wrote: > > > Please bear with me on this but... > > > > We are a small manufacturing company looking for new > corporate software > > (accounting, manufacturing with MRP, and sales order entry on a > > Unix/Linux platform. We have narrowed our choices down to 2 > vendors. One > > utilizes DB2 and one utilizes C-ISAM. As I am not a > database guru (and > > our company does not have an MIS department) I would like to ask the > > following questions: > OK > > > 1) Does C-ISAM = Informix? > No. Informix (the company) developed C-ISAM and it is the basic > underlying IO library for the Informix Standard Engine relational > database product, but the more advanced Dynamic Server products do not > even use that library. > For many years I worked in an enviroment that used C-ISAM files generated by a COBOL application. The system ran on SCO Openserver 5.x and was very, very fast. To gain the ability to generate our own reports and use an SQL interface we used Informix SE to also read the files. This worked very well with only 2 hiccoughs. Dates were stores as integers, ie today was 26082003. Very painful. We has some index corruption when Informix and the app were both adding records to a table with a composite index. We worked round this by our supplier providing a routine that added records from a flat file that we generated. The only other issue was the cost of buying SE. Colin Bull c.bull@videonetworks.com sending to informix-list