Re: Informix Tech Support?

Just to confirm what the Informix people (Madison Pruet) say and what Art said. It does work when you as a customer do it correct and have the correct expectations - excelent support, but real people at the other end. We have a regular low end support contract. We have needed support a few times. Once with a crashed engine and priority 1 support level. We are in Norway and get our support from the local office, Sweden and England. In one case I complained on the service I got to my sales people at Informix Norway and promptly got a phone call from a manager in England. The problem was solved immediately. In other cases I have reported minor problems and forgot them myself, but was prompted by Informix what had happened. If you treat the people right, but expect things from them and talk nicely to a manager when that is needed (no angry frustration wenting) I am relatively shure you should get the same kind of support from the US operations as we do here. I know of no other company with as excelent support as Informix gives us, and I have been in the industry since about 1975 and had to get support from a very larg number of companies. On Wed, 01 Apr 1998 21:38:15 GMT, Ray Garrison <apsnet@ix.netcom.com> wrote: >In article <6fu6ol$d28$1@news.xmission.com>, > "John S. Michael" <john.michael@flyingj.com> wrote: > >>Roger Tomas wrote in message <352291C9.D4DD7C06@agcs.com>... >>>We're migrating an application from 5.x to 7.x and have had to call >>>Informix technical support a number of times lately. Support has >>>varied from none to lame. In one case, I emailed some information >>>to the support person and never got a response. In another case, >>>my question received a meaningless answer. In yet another case, >>>I could hear the support person flipping pages in a manual. >>> >>>Am I just unlucky or has Informix's technical support gone down >>>the tubes? >>> >>>Roger Tomas >>>AG Communication Systems >> >> >>My company has basically given up on getting any support from Informix. >> >> >> > >This is a discussion thread I have wanted to see for quite some time. > >My company has been using Informix since 1990, for the most part the >OnLine engine on HP9000 servers of various sorts. Our databases are >not huge as these things go, but we are somewhat unusual in that most >DSS queries result in joins across three tables, each of which >currently has over 100,000,000 rows. We do a lot of "how many >green widgets did Anycity process last month, compared to our >overall average the previous month and every other city's average >for last month and the same month last year" type questions. At the >same time, the database is supporting an OLTP environment that inserts >about 400,000 new rows into each of those three tables every day. > >We frequently run into oddball problems - queries that never finish, >"assert failed - PANIC" type events, optimizer SNAFUs, and we are >constantly tweaking buffers, virtual processors, memory, kernel >parameters, and everything else in a desparate attempt to wring faster >processing. System currently is an HP9000 V2200 with 2 GIG RAM, >4 CPU, 64 bit HP/UX 11.0, 25 X 4 GIG disk on 5 FWSCSI II chains, >OnLine 7.23.UC1 > >I have _NEVER_ received _ANY_ exceptional assistance from Informix >Tech Support in the 8 years I've used them, and on a scale of 1 to 10 >I would say they average about 2. That scale, by the way, has WRQ >at about a 9 and CheckFree at a 5, just for comparison. > >I currently am waiting for an answer as to why I always get the >message "unknown error message 874" every time I try to set >pdqpriority. Error message text points at the optimizer, and >says to note conditions and call tech support. Fine. Conditions >are no one else is logged onto the damn host, I'm the only user, >I'm sitting in the ISQL window, no jobs/queries are running, and >I type set pdqpriority high. Or 100. Or low. Or whatever. Same >error message. Tech support asks me to fax them my onconfig, a >printout of onstat -a (which is huge), mayby try running oncheck >against each table and index (!!!) as "it might help", etc. > >Look, I don't expect people to have an instant answer to a problem >when I call, but I do expect to talk to someone who has a clue. For >what I pay every year (and if I could convince the board that we >shouldn't be paying we wouldn't be, but they keep hearing that you >have to budget 15% for "software support", so we keep on spending...) > >Anybody have better luck than we have? > >Dazed and confused in Connecticut, > >Ray Garrison Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: Primary with ODBC info: http://www.smooth1.demon.co.uk Official site http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html