Many, many, columns in a query ...

Hi. I hope some of you Informix gurus can help me come to a decision. We have been using Sybase for a couple of years in a back-burner R & D project. Well, the time has come to put up or shut up, and we are about to hit a wall when it comes to retrieving lots of columns in a query. Although in Sybase there is no limit per se for number of columns in a query, there is a limit of 250 columns in a table. If a query requires a worktable consisting of more than 250 columns, the query will fail. This can happen, for example, if you are doing more than 250 aggregates at once, or if you are sorting. Informix claims a limit of 32767 columns in a table, and a row size limit of 32767 bytes. That's big enough for us ... Does anyone regularly do queries with hundreds or thousands of columns at a time? How is the performance? We are also concerned about number of tables in a query - the Sybase limit is 16, including work tables. Informix has no limit (?), but does performance suffer when you are joining lots of tables? Finally, how much work is it going to be to translate all my scripts & stored procedures into Informix-ese? So, should we switch? Thanks to all ... -- Tom Warfield Data Base Administrator twarfield@vnunet.clark.net Claritas, Inc. Arlington VA