Re: Informix running on Linux

This is greate from Tim, David and all the others. If I had 7.x OnLine on Linux and 4GL, Java, JDBC and ODBC (I would make sure that the two last where available form OpenLink immediately) that's the products I would use for development. After a short while of developing with them customers would buy my products to run production on Linux. And my products are mission critical as few others. There are several reasons why this is interesting for me. One is the price which is getting out of hand using SCO Unix which is my alternative. (Sun, IBM and HP are fine for large customers, but their prices are becoming realy stupid.) Another is support. I can easily get support on Linux from a lot of sources. Using SCO I know of 2 commersial organisations here in Norway that can do it. One isn't very good bussinesswise. The other bind me to their PC's only - a local brand. The situation doesn't seem to be all that much better in other countries where I will sell my applications. A Linux port would make it easier to sell to a large number of small customers while I would still be able to sell to larger customers using other ports. At some time even the large ones may use Linux. I still think Informix should also evaluate porting SE to Linux. They have a very large number of SE sites out there (500.000???). I think they are currently loosing these at a fairly rapid rate, possibly without knowing about it. Large numbers of them are on old (5 to 10 years or older) hardware and badly need a change. Many are still on ver. 2.x (I know of many in Norway alone) and 4.x. Many simply need to do a few new things in 4GL that the old products can't handle. Others need connectivity for new tools or simply to MS Windows which the old engines and/or hardware it runs on can't handle. Informix have no upgrade path for these users. ***No upgrade path.*** The only real option they currently have is to rewrite their applications for other databases. Does Informix even begin to understand what this is doing to their market and marketshare? Although David have difficulties running SE, these people don't. Many of them would have problems with OnLine. However you look at it SE is very much simpler. With SE you copy the Informix software to the machine and brand it. Copy the application programs and database to the machine, set a small number of environement variables and start running the application. Nothing more to start it. Then you set up a cron script that does Unix *and* database backup nightly and run an "update statistics" script and bcheck/secheck. On any restart of the machine you make sure bcheck/secheck is allways executed. Our users run's for years with this setup with essentially no management at all - nothing except changing the backup tapes and checking the backup logs on their printer. Many don't even run logged databases. Can you imagin? - They don't need it. - Nightly backups are fine for many applications. You can run logged databases with SE, but if/when that need becomes critical and the amount of logging increases, the time has come to upgrade to OnLine. People are claiming they run 10GB databases on SE. That can surely work well in some cases, but personally I would switch to OnLine arround 1 GB for most types of applications. The above notwithstanding OnLine should get the highest priority if Informix need to prioritize. Porting SE should however be a no brainer. A simple recompile should do (hopefully). If there are problems Informix may even considder supporting the current SCO version on Linux. Informix should also understand that a Linux port would be one great way to get into the MS Windows based market in a better way. How can that be? The base market for Informix at the low end have been, and to a large extent still are the 4GL applications that have been developed. They require a Unix server. Whatever people try to do, runing 4GL applications directly on MS Windows or even Windows NT isn't easy and doesn't work well for these people. With a relatively low cost Linux port they could get the connectivity they need, keep their old 4GL applications runing in terminal emulators on Windows and start developing with newer tools. The new tools could be a US$495 version of NewEra - at that price many would be interested - Java, Delphi, VisualBasic, PowerBuilder or any other tool the developer wanted to use. In this way the developers could use a year or two to move their complete applications to Windows (or NC's). It could be moved a module at a time. At that time Informix would see significant additional sales of their Windows NT based engines. The applications that aren't dependent on Unix would be there. To sell on Windows NT now is only possible for new applications. I don't think the marketing side of Informix have fully relized this limitation and it's implications. Last, but not least: Porting to Linux would have to mean a full commitment from Informix. When Informix first ported to Windows NT (the SE 5.x database some years ago) Phil White told me that any further ports would be dependent on the sales results. I immediately lost any interest in even looking at this port. Many others did as well. Informix would have to clearly state up front that Linux would get all new versions early in the porting efforts. No later than SCO now, and preferably earlier. They will also have to hold up to this commitment even if they see lackluster sales for the first two years. This is essential for us, and I think for most others, if Informix wants us to do anything in return. And we will do a lot in return. Commit to it, go for it, and you will have another success product at your hands Informix. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org