A look at a different databases growing pains may yield insight in to Informix's future.

Using Cloudscape as an example... Some of you may know Cloudscape as a 100% Java , embedable database. IBM tossed it out under Apache license which meant that anyone could do what they want with it, and any company could then pick up the good things and relicense it as they see fit. Sun has picked up JavaDB and now push it out with their distros. Also sell support. IBM pulled out. What is interesting is that there are a couple of net new features. The downside to these features is that they increase the foot print of the database, making it larger and sometimes too big to embed in a web app. Looking forward, there has to be a design change such that certain features need to be "pluggable". That is you need to be able to customize the jar file to have only the features you want, outside of the core features you need. This way the same code base could be used to be embedded, and also to be a more GPRDBMS database written in Java. Taking a look at Informix. This same type of build could have its advantages. An example would be support for alternative indexing strategies. XML support, ODF/PDF document support, HA/ER support, and of course better parallelization similar to XPS. All of these extra features could be modular plug ins. Similar to the datablades. Any thoughts about having an IDS engine that could cluster up as a MPP shared nothing clusert to do advanced DW? Naw, that would fly in the face of DB2. :-( But its a good idea. -G _________________________________________________________________ See what people are saying about Windows Live. Check out featured posts. http://www.windowslive.com/connect?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_connect2_082008