IIUG - Survey Results

August 6, 1997 In July, 1997 the IIUG conducted its first Feature Request Survey. This survey was compiled and published in a very short amount of time and included items from Informix's internal request database as well as from a discussion thread started here in the the comp.databases.informix Usenet group by Tim Schaefer. The survey was distributed via this newsgroup and well as through e-mail to those IIUG members who provided a valid e-mail address to the IIUG. The format of the survey was fairly basic. Each person responding to the survey had a total of 100 "credits" to allocate however they wished to the items on the survey. This allowed them to indicate importance, as well as weight, for their responses. These results were compiled and presented to Informix's senior product managers at the 1997 Informix Worldwide User Conference held in San Francisco. They were very excited to see the results and took part of the time during the meeting of the Informix User Group Leadership Council to respond to some of the issues this survey raised. Their comments about the survey's results, and their willingness to work with us on these and other issues is fueling the IIUG Advocacy Program (http://www.iiug.org/advocacy). Some of these same issues raised in this survey were discussed as well during the "Ask the Experts" track session the IIUG sponsored as part of the IIUG Technical Track at this year's conference. The IIUG will be posting an edited transcript of that session on our web server shortly. Enclosed in this message are the top ten feature requests, and their total credits received, for the 171 responses we received. While some of these items in the survey also included the ability to add comments for that item, those comments are not included. They are being compiled to give to Informix however. If you would like to see the full version of the numeric results, point your browser to http://www.iiug.org/advocacy/iiug_survey_1.html The IIUG would like to thank all who participated in this survey, and Barbara Macarage who compiled the numerical results. The Top Ten # of Credits Feature Request 1052 Table level backup 929 Port ODS 7.x, 4GL, SE, ISQL, ESQL/C to Linux 823 Case insensitive search 623 Fix 4GL and adopt the changes proposed long ago by others 603 JDBC support 532 Faster update statistics 406 Shrink_wrap New Era. Drop the run_time licensing fees 406 A data dictionary incorporated into the database overhead tables that allows entry of documentation for each object 361 Publicize a patch list 356 Scrolling forms in 4GL 352 Long table and column names. Carlton Doe Chair, IIUG Advocacy Committee carlton@iiug.org