Re: INET & Win95

> william@carsinfo.com (William Harris) writes: > In article <4m228c$cqc@nic.ftns.no>, Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no says... > >Our testings so far shows this as an excelent product that among other > >things has security features Informix aparantly haven't even begun to > >think about. > > Can you expand upon that? We've tried the 30-day trial version, and I don't > remember any special features along those lines. It may only be evident in > the documentation that comes with the purchased product. On http://www.rockhopper.com/openlink/product.html there is a link called OpenLink ODBC Technical White Paper which is to a file called whitep.zip. This expands to whitep.doc and is an MS Word for Windows document. If you lack either an unzip program or MS Word you are out of luck. (OpenLink: Why don't you post this as a sequence of html pages so everybody can easily read it.) This file describes several of the security featurs. Basically you can limit who can connect via ODBC and apperantly also with which programs. This last we haven't had time to look into yet whether it works and how well. There is also encryption options in case you run over an insecure network. All this security is possible because OpenLink run the ODBC server (the part of ODBC that translates SQL and data back and forth between the ODBC standard and what your database engine need) on the same machine your database is running. In my opinion this is the only way ODBC can be run in large installations with any security requirements, and should also give you better performance. The more common system with everything ODBC releated running on each PC connecting via some native database drivers also running on each PC is generally a bad idea. (Some of the issues are: Installation, performance and security.) On the web site given above the manuals are also available, but I haven't had the time to download these yet. We are still in a trial periode and discussing pricing and other issues with OpenLink. They aren't cheap. > >Informix CLI (the ODBC driver from > >Informix running on top of I-Net) is simply to buggy and badly implemented > >to be of any real use. > > Care to expand upon this, also? I want to be clear about which ODBC driver > you're talking about. Informix resells two different ODBC drivers, the one > that comes with Informix-CLI (Visigenics) and, at least at one time, they also > sold the Intersolv (formerly Q+E) ODBC driver. Your comments appear to be > directed at the Visigenics driver, but in my experience would be more correctly > heaped on the Intersolv one. (To be sure, neither one comes in an official > Informix Windows 95 flavor.) I also had the Intersolve one, but never realy got it to work. That was a long time ago, and newer versions may work ok. But the last I checked they ran all functions on the PC and used I-Net. First I-Net in itself isn't a very fun product to neither install nor use. Second this is a PC only solution which gives little oportunity for added security, performance or anything. Also if you should ever have to connect to another database you need to install even more products on every PC. With OpenLink there is only one install on the PC, the OpenLink driver. The rest is done on the server. About bugs in Informix CLI (the Visigenic drivers) it doesn't work with MS Access (at least not the version I have). First there is the previously reported bug that you can't connect to some tables. It seems to have something with how primary keys and/or indexes are created. Second I had problems updating data in most tables. I haven't ever bothered to find out why. I expect such things simply to work. If they don't I have to many other important things I can do to have the time to spend with Informix support to find out exactly what is wrong. The main thing here is however that as soon as I installed the trial version of OpenLink the problems disappeared. Then why bother with Informix? To Informix: Why don't you buy OpenLink? (Or alternatively, if they aren't for sale, why don't you look into supplying their ODBC drivers.) > The reason I ask is that I have not had much luck at all with the Q+E/Intersolv > driver. Previous versions would GPF on me, and I had major problems installing > and using the one first released under the Intersolv name. I haven't > experienced any such problems with the Visigenics (Informix-CLI) ODBC driver. No, I also haven't had GPF's with Informix CLI. But there are all the issues with the services files, problems with aged passwords, a setnet-utility that has been written by some... (I can't say that here), the ilogin-utility for testing connections... (no sorry, my opinon about that also don't fit here). Think what would happen if we where to support a product like this in several European contries on hundreds or thousands of PC's. Bankrupty comes to mind very fast. Why bother. An option with the OpenLink driver if you have only one server and don't need access to this via TCP/IP you can set up shared memory access only to the Informix database. In that case there is no way anybody can access this server via other ODBC drivers than OpenLink. This may enhance your security. Before we finaly decide on what ODBC drivers to use we will also test SQL-Retriever from SCO. They seem to work essentially the same way as OpenLink, but I don't know if they have all the security and other features of OpenLink. Both OpenLink and SQL-Retriever supports most versions of Informix engines back to 4.x. OpenLink doesn't have the server version for 7.x available for download for testing. We used the 6.x version with no problems (some minor changes to some files where necessary). Be aware that OpenLink also have something they call OpenLink Lite. As far as I understand these are drivers that run on each PC only. That isn't what we want, but may be ok in small settings. Just so it's said: Informix is the best database company arround right now, and they have generaly excelent products. I expect the current problems they have with ODBC drivers and some other MS Windows based products to be very temporary. Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no NM Data AS, Postbox 9090, Gronland, 0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company I claim copyright on this posting, and it may not be used for any purpose but further discussions in this newsgroup or for your own private study without prior permission.