Re: Informix NT vs Unix

Larry Johnsn (ljohnson@erols.com) wrote: : My company is planning to replace our unix server with a dual pent. Dell. We : are currently using Informix 5.0 On-line in a client server enviroment. The : decision as to the OS is up to me. As a group, NT is new to Informixers and there's a lot of prejudice/ignorance here about it. I was the same way, but after working with it for several years, I am definitely a convert. I'm getting better performance with NT than with UnixWare 2.X. I have one system that is outperformig a HP 8-processor system. I see **no** stability problems if the NT is set up correctly. I have instances that have run for three months without rebooting or restarting the engine. Mils hit on one negative, the single instance restriction, and I'm glad that goes away with 7.3. One of the reasons I like NT is that I don't want a lot of other applications, especially other databases, running on my Informix server. This seems to be a little easier to stipulate with an NT server than with a UNIX server, from a political standpoint, with IS departments. They **expect** a big UNIX box to be multi-purpose, but not necessarily an NT box. I like NT's performance monitoring tools. You'll miss the UNIX utilities, that are great for dealing with large flat-files such as dbload files, but there's a good workaround. I will not run an NT box without the Mortice Kern (MKS) Toolkit, which provides about 160 UNIX utilities, as well as Perl. MKS makes NT almost like a real OS. My application is a 200-gigabyte data warehouse runnng on a clustered NT server designed for fault-tolerance from Stratus (Stratus RADIO). I don't have a lot of users hitting it, so I can't address that. Don't discount the NT. It's a winner. That was originally very hard for me to say, as I'm one of the original UNIX bigots from way back. Informix on NT will not replace UNIX, but it definitely has its place. joe -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Lumbley(jlumbley@netcom.com) author of: "INFORMIX DBA Survival Guide" Slaving away on "INFORMIX DEBUGGERS Survival Guide", available early 1998 from Prentice Hall/Informix Press. If you have debugging tips, tools, or ideas to share, please send me some e-mail. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------