Re: Informix vs Oracle

These are my obervations: 1. Maintenance Informix is much easier to maintain than Oracle. 2. Tech support Oracle has better/more knowledgeable support 3. Architecture Informix is more designed for Unix where Oracle carries mainframe legacy in it's rigid structure which sometimes is very inflexible. 4. Tools/Apps There are more 3rd party tools and apps supporting Oracle. 5. Tunability Oracle is more tunable and scalable. ( may or may not be an advantage, depending on your need ) 6. Backup Informix DSA has a very sophisticated backup utility. Oracle leaves that to the operating system or 3rd party. A major difference is though, for Informix you can do a real 'incremental backup' but in Oracle, there is no such thing since all datafiles are touched at startup. So the backup utility will pick up the whole instance as a full backup. 7. Training In terms of DBA, it's cheaper and faster to obtain your in-house expertise using Informix. Oracle is a very complex product which has to run on lots of platforms but you see Informix mainly in the Unix market and therefore the components are simpler and easier for your staff to become familiar with. If you are doing in-house development, Informix has very powerful languages for both character and graphic based environment. Oracle has a very simple PL/SQL language that you may not want to use for serious application development. In general, if you have a very large DB environment you may want to consider using Oracle, not so much for its performance, but for tunability and scalability. But your resource needed to support this environment is also much higher. Informix, in my opinion, is perfect for smaller environment ( again, not because of performance, and in fact benchmark test has shown that in certain large environments Informix already outperformed Oracle ) where you don't care too much about all these fine tuning but you do care more about simpler configurations and maintenance and your resource spending.