Comparison shopping.....

johnson@chaos.dac.neu.edu (Chris Johnson) wrote: -> I'm new here so please excuse me if this kind of thing has been -> asked before. No problem. -> I'm inheriting an RS6000 with AIX, SYBASE, and Remedy. SYBASE is -> trying to act as a backend to Remedy. The person I've assigned to the -> RS6000 AIX UNIX end hates AIX. After managing a digital UNIX system I don't -> blaim him. I've never worked on Digital UNIX, but *I* think AIX is great. Are you on 3.2.5? -> We're having many problems with SYBASE and Remedy as well. I think -> I'm stuck with Remedy for the moment. So, the, um, cure is part of the the problem? :-) -> What I'm looking for is a comparison between Informix, Oracle, and -> SYBASE. I need the answers to all the good questions one needs to ask about -> any piece of a critical system: I've only got oldish Oracle and up-to-the last release Informix, but here's my 0.02c worth: -> o How good/acurate is the documentation? Oracle: appalling. Informix: pretty good, and some nice third party books (like Joe Lumbley's :)) -> o How is installation and maintenance? Oracle: Installation: non-trivial; maintenance (by which I assume you mean DBA'ing) a living nightmare. Informix: Installation: trivial, except maybe for V7; maintenance: a doddle, V7 a little more involved, especially if you want fancy backups. -> o How difficult is crash recovery? Oracle: didn't really have any in my day...UNIX backups... Informix: can only restore full backup, unless you go to V7 -> o How is service response when I call with a problem? No idea in your neck of the woods. -> o How is training (install, maintenance, and user level)? Ditto. -> o How frequent are bug fixes? Oracle: we never got one in the time (+- 1 yr) that I worked on it. Informix: Pretty regular (+- 1-3 months) -> o How easy do the bug fixes go in? Oracle: no idea. Informix: Simple. -> o Anything else you can think of. Oracle: I hear it's gotten much better and is possibly a little more stable than Informix. (But that's hearsay, if not heresy around here! :)) Informix: Has a lot more flexibility, and unless you're on the 64-bit Alpha (which, knowing IBM as I do, you're not :-)), I think it performs better on a price/performance basis. I don't know how much use you're making of Sybase triggers, etc., but whichever way you go, watch out if you convert: we're in the progress of converting a Sybase system to Informix and we've found some really hair-raising non-ANSI extensions to Sybase triggers & stored procs. Since I'm a fanatical Informix lover and a passionate Oracle hater, I'm sure you can guess which way I'd recommend you to go. However, FWIW, I have used Informix for +- 12 yrs and it's never really let me down, so I guess I owe it *some* loyalty... :) -> Obviously I want it to go in like a dream, never crash, have no -> bugs, the documentation is alway correct and complete .... ;-). -> Any help much appreciated. Thank you. HTH. Regards, billy.wheeler@digitec.co.za ---- Digitec Online - South Africa Telnet: bbs.digitec.co.za