some questions about Informix

hi, in one project our customer wants to implement a new RDBMS-System. For the moment there are two questions: a) is there a direct comparison between oracle an informix. (yes/no, better/worse) b) our customer uses Informix in the Version 5.x and earlier. Is someone there with experience with the upgrade to version 7.x. Thanks for your answer in advance Konstantin

Konstantin Thomopoulos wrote: > > hi, > in one project our customer wants to implement a new RDBMS-System. > For the moment there are two questions: > a) is there a direct comparison between oracle an informix. (yes/no, > better/worse) Pretty much everyone here will tell you that Informix is a vastly superior RDBMS product than Oracle. Informix DBAs are a loyal and loving bunch. There are no good comparison documents around. > b) our customer uses Informix in the Version 5.x and earlier. Is someone > there with > experience with the upgrade to version 7.x. The upgrade is mostly painless. It is best to follow these steps: 1) Archive the 5.xx instance, level 0. 2) Drop ALL indexes before the upgrade as 7.xx will have to rebuild them all and the upgrade process does this single threaded. You can rebuild them faster yourself using PDQPRIORITY (parallel query) and PSORT_NPROCS/PSORT_DBTEMP (parallel sort) environment variables to optimize each build and you can build one index on each of several tables at once. 3) Shutdown the 5.xx engine. 4) Modify the appropriate environment variables (INFORMIXDIR, INFORMIXSERVER, ONCONFIG, etc). 5) Start up the 7.xx engine. 6) Wait for table conversion. 7) Archive the 7.xx instance, level 0. 8) Rebuild indexes. 9) Archive the 7.xx instance again, level 0. Art S. Kagel