Re: Informix SE 7.x: Does it support data types 'text', 'varchar'??

On 11 Aug 1998 08:13:25 GMT, ck@held.mind.de (Christian Kirsch) wrote: >In article <35ccde6d.0@news2.uswest.net>, > krwall@uswest.net writes: > >> >> I don't find it ironic, just a sign of incredible ingratitude. The Linux >> community finally get an industrial strength DBMS from a major vendor, and >> immediately complain about missing features in a free version. How many >> actually took the time to bang out a quick "thanks" to Informix for doing >> so? I did, and encourage my colleagues to do the same. > >Could you elaborate a bit more on the points "industrial strength" and >"missing features"? IMHO this is an obvious contradiction -- or are >missing features vital for industrial strength? Industrial strength isn't about getting all kinds of features. Asking for ever more features only is an unfortunate result of the current state of affairs, particularly in the PC industry. Industrial strength is about something working - working day in and day out without any kind of problems, or at least a very minimal number of problems. This is where the Informix database engines and other products really shine. I have several customers with little to no real computer knowledge that use their applications for mission critical work. They simply run every day and night all year round. No reboots, no reorgainsation of the database, never any restores due to any kind of problems. Even if you turn off power to the computer in the middle of active usage of the database there is a very simple procedure with little user interaction to check the database and then keep working. These kinds of things is all that industrial strength is about. Nothing else. Of course you could wish for some more features. BLOBS and TEXT datatypes may have been nice. Wishing isn't particularly interesting though. They would have had consequences in making the engine somewhat more complicated and a little hard to implement efficiently within the constraints of SE that use a simple structure of one data file and one index file for each table. That structure is part of what makes SE such an elegant tool for so many users. There are of course applications where BLOBS and TEXT datatypes are required. There are however also applications for which user defined datatypes and methods to operate on them, inheritance and the whole set of features in a ORDBMS is required. Does that mean SE should be such a database? No way. Is BLOBS and/or TEXT datatypes a requirement for your applications? Then SE isn't for you, another Informix engine will be. Simple. SE is the right database for one large set of applications. Informix have other engines for other types of applications. One nice thing about these engines is their upward compatibility's. An application created for SE will run unchanged (with some minor issues you have to take care of in your design) on the other Informix engines. This is actually the best solution for everyone. Now we only look forward to Informix porting their IDS engine. I hope and actually assume they will. Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html (Now with ODBC info under "Third party products".)