ODBC - some observations

Hello, I am posting this for people who are interested in using ODBC for Informix. First some golden truths.. 1. Forget about Informix I-Net product. Its useless (sorry). It has a large memory footprint, is difficult to set up and is slow and is expensive. And also it only works with Informix! 2. For get about Intersolvs Q+E or whatever it is called. Its bloody expensive and performance is slow and also uses lots of memory. I could continue here but I tried this product a few years ago and threw it out way back when we were in the evaluation stage. There are two products which I know of, both by English companies (co-incidence ?). One is called SQL-Retreiver, by VisionWare, (who also do a very good X-windows on Microsoft Windows), and OpenLink by OpenLink Software. We use SQL-Retriever. I reviewed OpenLink and decided against it. I have been using SQL-Retreiver for three years now and have implemented it in three large sites. The first is the Indonesian stock exchange in Jakarta and Surabaya. Here they have about 5000 online users using Informix OnLine 6.x with pc's running Windows for Workgroups The client side code was done in VB3.0, and is being updated to VB4. Three largish HP boxes run this and they are configured as a live box, a hot backup and a referee. The middle tier has several smaller HP boxes running the enquiry servers. These machines all run HP-UX 10. The other installations are the Sun Alliance group, and the ING Bank in Sydney. The machines used here are SUN Sparcs, Pc's runnig SCO Unix and HP. SQLR also works over a phone line and does this quite well over the poor quality lines in Indonesia. You don't have to pay USD$300.00 for each pc to have I-NET and Q+E, or I-Star for the Server. The SQL-Retriever product removes this requirement, as it uses remote procedure calls (RPC's). Also SQLR is heaps faster than Q+E, flames invited, we have tried all three, so there! SQLR's technical suport is excellent, you will speak to the people who work next to the ones who wrote the stuff. Visionware is now owned by SCO but this does not seem to have changed the company in any way. From SCO's point of view this is a very strateigic product. One interesting this is that SQLR's largest database is Informix. Theres my bit. I talked a lot because the product is worth the write up. Robert Lore, DATATREE Computing Systems Pty Ltd