informix bashing

Several days ago, I posted a message stating that I was getting tired of the informix bashing that has been going on. The responses to my email have run considerably against informix. You've made some valid points (ie: I don't have to read those postings, this is the appropriate forum for some of the complaints). There is one response that I must take exception to: >Perhaps the pricing/support benefit ratio is not >significant at Bellcore as money may be of no object; such is not the case out >here in VAR land where end-user customer satisfaction is the end-all of >everything. Without it we are dead, while Bell simply raises the rates. :-) Bellcore has no rates to raise. True, we are owned by the various phone companies, but we also must sell the systems that we build to these same phone companies at a competitive cost. We are, in fact, a bit like a VAR and any of you other VAR's can also sell systems to the phone companies. Having said all that, let me restate the intention of my original email. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that maybe there has been some jumping on the band-wagon in rushing to bad-mouth informix support. My background is mostly mainframe oriented, but it seems to me that informix support is comparable to many SOFTWARE vendors (some of you mentioned better support from Pyramid and Sun - but the nature of hardware/ operating system problems tend to be more dabilitating then software problems - making fixes more urgent). You need to take a step back and think about the impact of fixing a bug that might affect other working software. One of the reason why experts in a particular vendor product are paid well is that they know how to workaround the shortcomings of the product. I have to believe that the problems that you have found do have workarounds, or you would have dropped informix years ago. I think that I prefer a vendor that err's on the side of stablility, rather than rushing out a half-tested fix to every problem. Warren J. Saccente Bellcore Note: my opinions are not necessary consistent with those of my employer,etc.