I want to go back to C-ISAM

I want to go back to C-ISAM IDS is merely a sham It's backups you see, are useless as can be You can't retrieve info worth a damn -------- #if rant I'm just bloody annoyed with IDS backups (and our support company, but mainly IDS). We need to retrieve a single dbspace from a Level 0 backup, on to a different machine (can't have downtime on the live machine). I've found out now that we need to have everything *identical* on both machines down to chunks allocated to each dbspace, even if the particular dbspace I'm restoring is identical on both machines. This is outrageous - because I can't have downtime on our live machine, I'm *required* to have a second, identically set-up machine with similar disk-space requirements and an extra informix licence. I have the machine, but I now need to buy disk space in quick or shout at the support company enough until they restore it for me on one of their machines. And it's not like this problem's never going to happen again - it only takes one bozo programmer to accidentally remove all the useful information from a table, or a dopey systems administrator to accidentally drop a database. Bring back C-ISAM - the raw .dat and .idx files are sitting there on a cpio tape and I can selectively restore anything I need to, to a different area, different machine if I want to - sure, there's a very slight chance that they'll be corruptions, but bcheck'll sort it out and there are a surfeit of hacks I can use to get things right. Now I'm faced with the prospect of changing the backup process to unload every bloody table in the databases (there are approximately 1000 tables) and performing a separate backup to standard tape. Why does IDS want to be it's own operating system? It seems to want access to raw disk, but you can't restore meaningful data from backups. It wants a tempdbs, where under C-ISAM, the /tmp/ unix directory was perfectly fine. Let me maintain *one* system - the OS or the database, but don't make me maintain both. Sure, IDS is faster, and has got far far better client/server support, but the improvements in SQL interface are negligible, and I'm sure given a 2-processor 64bit machine with 4GB memory, C-ISAM would be much quicker too. #end rant

You **can** create dbspaces in Informix as system files just like in DB2, MySQL, Informix-SE, SQL-Server, instead of raw disks. Performance gains for raw disks is a relative factor based on how fast your disk drives are and in context to how fast does the system or application really need to perform compared to other systems ( and competing products!). Check out competing products, Informix is not the only game in town--that's the myth. Why would any DBA want to put themselves in a position that they can't restore the data the way you would want to? "BigCalm" <bigcalm@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:71cc6cb6.0403310416.5370da10@posting.google.com... > I want to go back to C-ISAM > IDS is merely a sham > It's backups you see, are useless as can be > You can't retrieve info worth a damn > > -------- > > #if rant > > I'm just bloody annoyed with IDS backups (and our support company, but > mainly IDS). We need to retrieve a single dbspace from a Level 0 > backup, on to a different machine (can't have downtime on the live > machine). I've found out now that we need to have everything > *identical* on both machines down to chunks allocated to each dbspace, > even if the particular dbspace I'm restoring is identical on both > machines. This is outrageous - because I can't have downtime on our > live machine, I'm *required* to have a second, identically set-up > machine with similar disk-space requirements and an extra informix > licence. I have the machine, but I now need to buy disk space in > quick or shout at the support company enough until they restore it for > me on one of their machines. And it's not like this problem's never > going to happen again - it only takes one bozo programmer to > accidentally remove all the useful information from a table, or a > dopey systems administrator to accidentally drop a database. > > Bring back C-ISAM - the raw .dat and .idx files are sitting there on a > cpio tape and I can selectively restore anything I need to, to a > different area, different machine if I want to - sure, there's a very > slight chance that they'll be corruptions, but bcheck'll sort it out > and there are a surfeit of hacks I can use to get things right. Now > I'm faced with the prospect of changing the backup process to unload > every bloody table in the databases (there are approximately 1000 > tables) and performing a separate backup to standard tape. > > Why does IDS want to be it's own operating system? It seems to want > access to raw disk, but you can't restore meaningful data from > backups. It wants a tempdbs, where under C-ISAM, the /tmp/ unix > directory was perfectly fine. Let me maintain *one* system - the OS > or the database, but don't make me maintain both. > > Sure, IDS is faster, and has got far far better client/server support, > but the improvements in SQL interface are negligible, and I'm sure > given a 2-processor 64bit machine with 4GB memory, C-ISAM would be > much quicker too. > > #end rant