My really LAST experience with Informix

Yes, after asking our Distributor over and over he said today, that Informix Online 5.0 is available. First I was glad because our 4.1 version has a lot of bugs. But then the Distributer told me the conditions for updating FROM A BUGGY RELEASE to a hopefully more stable version : a) I have to pay 9 percent of the end-user price because I do not have a support contract yet. b) I have to pay another 18 percent of the end-user price for the support contract. c) If the new list-price is higher than the old one, I have to pay DM 1000, dont know for what. d) Online itself once costed twice as much as as the Computer (486/33) we use it on. I relly do not need a support contract, a database is for making developers life easier. If an experienced database developer would need support for using a database it cannot be a good product. Those crazy update conditions are not only for Informix-Online, they are equal with Standard Engine, ESQL-C, isql, Informix-Star, Net and so on. All in all I think I could buy a nice car for those costs. I am not willing to use these program anymore, if anyone likes to buy them :-). But I suppose you have to pay some 100 percent more, If you would ever update them. Does anybody know about other Unix sql-databases ? I heard about db-vista, but I heard that it is not as flexible as a relational database. I don't care about networking facilities and datatypes like BLOBS because they are easy to simulate with Unix-facilities. Never buy Informix BTW: My Signature : It's not a bug, it's a feature was written one day when Informix told me about the fact that $describe does not work with updates and that this is a feature in their opinion. -- Origin: It's not a bug, it's a feature !