RE: Porting from SCO Unix to AIX

> >Anyone have experience moving an Informix application from one flavor of Unix > >to the other? I may have to do this very thing soon and would like to know if > > >it is a cake-walk or otherwise. > > Hey Mike, that is what "Open Systems" is all about! > We do this all the time! > We are the Informix distributors for the Caribbean and we have done > this at least 12 times from SCO to AIX (RS/6000). All you have to do > is to copy everything (frm, arc, 4gi, dbs, etc.) to the AIX machine, > load your new Informix and run it. You won't need to recompile them, > but if there's a newer version of Informix (i.e. 1.10 to 4.0) it's > better to recompile before running the applications. > > In our office we develop using 4.0 on the RS/6000, but some customers > have 1.10 under SCO and everything run perfectly! YES, IT'S THAT EASY. It is not as easy as this unfortunately. Informix say that source level is compatible for the same versions of Informix software. This is true to a great extent but there are occasional differences between the ports which mean that programs dont always compile or run correctly. (This isn't always Informix's fault as some of the ports are done by other companies - SCO being a case in point as far as I know). Also .03 code compiles under 4.0 pretty well though there are some differences such as the recent problem we and others have had with reverse video fields. As for compiled code this is pretty well guaranteed not to work as the C compiler and libraries are different on most different flavours of Unix/machine combinations as they are targetted to different chip and hardware designs. There is no way that a compiled 4gi from SCO would work under AIX as the machine architectures are so different. I haven't personally tried porting the p-code version of Informix between machines, but there is a good chance that this would work on different machines as the pcode is the same and is interpreted at run time. Still there is the chance of porting bugs here so code would still need rigorous testing. Between different versions of Informix things get more complicated as you have new or different facilities built into the code. If you try and run 4.0 code with .03 runtime it wont work. Other way round you may get away with it but if you happen to use facilities which have been removed or changed in the 4.0 runtime the programs will crash. We have found a couple of these situations and Informix do not support this so there is very little chance of either finding or fixing the problem. One thing that Informix has said will be compatible is that 4.0 and 4.1 engines will work with .03 code. This works well, at the moment we do it a lot. I don't know whether the 5.0 engine will still work with .03 code but they have said it will be compatible with 4.0 code. Hope this helps Jim -------------------------------------------------------------------- Name: Jim Gordon Internet: jgordon@ssf-sys.DHL.COM Company: DHL Systems Inc Phone: (415) 358-5911 (Work) Address: 1700 S. Amphlett Blvd. (415) 882-9728 (Home) San Mateo, CA 94402 Fax: (415) 571-6429 --------------------------------------------------------------------