Re: Overall unstableness of Informix

MICHAELS@dartinc.com (Michael Silver) wrote: >We have had an Informix (7.12.UC2) database running on an HP for over a >year. We have been utterly disappointed with it. It crashes about >once-a-week. We run a lot of batch work against it using New Era for >Motif, which is responsible for many of the crashes. How a programming >language can crash the database engine is beyond me. Often times a >small batch job will hit the engine so hard, that everyone else in the >database times out. We can't use PDQ, because it crashes the database, >or causes strange things to happen. We have a dual processor HP Model >K. Our database fits into RAM (we have 512MB). We have dual port fast >and wide SCSI, with about 6 GB storage. A relatively small database, on >a fast machine, but we get very poor performance. We have had Informix >out here at least every 6 months, and nothing gets fixed, which makes >the $5000 bill hard to swallow. Even HP doesn't understand he >performance >Is this typical? Does everyone have these problems? Perhaps we are on >the wrong platform? Is Informix just this bad? Should we switch to >Oracle or another database? We went to a user group meeting and laughed >when Informix told us about the datablades. We can't even get the >normal version to work. We feel we can get better performance from an >NT quad Pentium Pro, running SQL server. This is not practical for as >large as we expect to grow, but the fact that they can honestly be >compared is scary. What to do. We have informix 7.11 running on a dual hp t500 now for over a year. The test bed engine will crash sometimes with bad code but the production engine has been very stable. I ran into two things that caused the engine to do weird things. There seems to be a bug if you run oncheck multiple times without bringing the engine down and back up. I do not remember the magic number. I also ran into a problem with onarchive crashing the system when ran to many times between the online coming down and backup. This online stays up about 3 months at a time. I have heard of one other weird bug that caused the engine to crash when the application ran an update statistics every 5 seconds. PDQ is a good thing, but from my experience you really want to know your application and study PDQ before using it. If your not careful you will lock everyone else out. Did informix look only at your engine or did you have them look at the application code as well. We had a batch job running 20 hours and informix found some things in the application where now it runs in seconds. This took a hugh load off of our system. Hope this helps -- Tolly Brumbelow, Informix DBA email:tolly.brumbelow@bridge.bellsouth.com