Opinions on Informix

I am interested in hearing your opinions of Informix's database as compared to others (ie, Oracle, Baan, etc). I have heard that the Informix dbms is not as 'good' as Oracle. Is this true? Does it integrate well with ERP packages? I would like to get just some general comments on the overall quality of the product and how it stacks up to its competitors. Many thanks, Patrick

Wow, a great opportunity to chat... :-) As was stated, Baan is an application, not a data base. Your posting is rather peculiar as it makes you look as if you're dumb, but the questions are posed as if you're somebody who knows enough to ask about data bases, and you managed to get to a newsgroup, and ask a few questions. D a m n peculiar. Anyway... You've given me an opportunity to rant... Informix is simpler to set up as an engine, simpler to maintain as a data base, and superior by design technically. But as stated here already, Informix has a marketing problem. They don't market their products. Oracle recently released their 8.x standard server on Linux, but you can't do "partitioning" with it which is the equivalent ( somewhat ) of fragmentation in Informix. This is stated in the docs that come with the 8.0.5 Linux release of Oracle Standard Server 8. The Enterprise version is not available for Linux, and the price point for this version is a bit steep for a UNIX system, so the typical Oracle developer is still forced to play over in the big money space if they want the full meal deal when it comes to Oracle. I imagine they will eventually ramp up in Linux, but only when it becomes necessary to shunt any of the whimpers that come out of Informix or Sybase. Oracle has a laughable parallel architecture, which isn't really anything, just a reconfiguring and somewhat of a clusterf*** of several SMP servers. But... Oracle DOES sell the most data base systems in the USA market bar none. This is as a direct result of selling vertical apps that compete somewhat with Baan, Peoplesoft, and SAP. If you do parallel queries in Oracle using their equivalent of XPS the SQL is more complicated as the Oracle engine does not do coserver scans by default, these have to be coded into the SQL, which isn't necessary in Informix's case, the user doesn't know if there was one server or 100, as in the case of a big data warehouse. The result sets in Oracle come back by partition rather than as one result set as in the case of Informix. Oracle illustrates this in their docs. Architecturally, Oracle would be quite easy to beat in the market place if somebody at the top at Informix would simply talk about it. But they can only do that if they understand their products. Unfortunately, but rightly so, most customers and managers would rather have a name with marketing behind the product such as Oracle rather than a name with superior technology and no marketing such as Informix. This is simple risk management. Determine your risk in going with the data base company of your choice, make your choice, and keep your risks down. At least nobody will fault you for that. Thanks, Tim "Patrick J. Nolan, Jr." wrote: > > I am interested in hearing your opinions of Informix's database as compared > to others (ie, Oracle, Baan, etc). I have heard that the Informix dbms is > not as 'good' as Oracle. Is this true? Does it integrate well with ERP > packages? I would like to get just some general comments on the overall > quality of the product and how it stacks up to its competitors. > > Many thanks, > Patrick -- - -- --- Tim Schaefer ---- tschaefe@mindspring.com --- http://www.inxutil.com -- -

IMHO, Informix and Oracle have similar functionality, scalability, and speed. As is usually the case, one product excells in one area, the other product in another. At one time, part of the decision process was cost; both to purchase and annual maintenance. Informix had the 'rep' of being a lot less pricey. Therefore, shops like mine made the decision based upon $$$. I don't feel that Informix is any less expensive now. Based upon the 'highway robbery' they try to commit committed when you try and license a Client/Server environment. In our shop, they wanted licenses for each of the 1,000 PC's when only about 200 connect at any one time. Add to that Informix's many attempts to actually build and market a non-character based programming tool (ie. New Era) or any other tools other than the engine itself and one gains understanding as to market share. Now stepping off soap box...

I wanted to add something here, after reading a lot of these great posts. About a week or so ago I bought several Oracle books, to better understand their products. The most amusing one of the bunch is the one on Oracle Data Warehousing! Several observations: 1. The Oracle docs never dive deep into anything concrete, but rather treat the reader as if they are nothing more than a sophisticated end-user. 2. The Oracle data warehousing paradigm is nothing more than tying several servers together to a shared disk ( probably NFS mounted as the docs don't tell you). They emphasize raw disk usage but most of the docs talk about using regular cooked files. Nothing specific. 3. A really important note about Oracle Data Warehousing, from their own docs: Let's say that in Informix XPS, you set up four servers, and fragmented a customer table across these four servers. You might have customer.1, customer.2 customer.3, customer.4 dbspaces. You might fragment by hybrid on customer_no in customer.1, customer.2, customer.3, customer.4. In Informix, on XPS, you can "select * from customer" and a result set comes back. The user has no idea that the data is residing on 4 SEPARATE disk subsystems to take advantage of real multiserver parallelism, and gets their result set back nice and fast, in ONE set. If you didn't know any better, you'd think it's just one server, and go about your business. In Oracle, the syntax would be as follows: select * from customer.1 union select * from customer.2 union select * from customer.3 union select * from customer.4 And the result set comes back in pieces! Now, I have to ask myself, as just a dumbass end-user, why do I have to do all this union stuff? Can't I just get the result back in one piece? There is hardly any information on Oracle PQO their "equivalent" of XPS, so my above observations are only from their book. ( PQO =Parallel Query Option ) 4. Anyone can go buy the Oracle books I bought, and read up on the beast, and see what's really available. The big question is, if *I* can do this, and understand the differences SIMPLY FROM THE DOCS <<HELLO>> why can't Informix Marketing????? <<HELLO>>!. Informix Marketing, pay attention, you need to SELL your products, and rebut the competition. You need to illustrate in clear terms simple differences like this. XPS should be selling big if you simply compete. After all, data warehousing is one of your focused markets, not just i.Sell. XPS should be on Linux, THE next great arena for clustered systems. Thanks, Tim "Patrick J. Nolan, Jr." wrote: > > I am interested in hearing your opinions of Informix's database as compared > to others (ie, Oracle, Baan, etc). I have heard that the Informix dbms is > not as 'good' as Oracle. Is this true? Does it integrate well with ERP > packages? I would like to get just some general comments on the overall > quality of the product and how it stacks up to its competitors. > > Many thanks, > Patrick -- - -- --- Tim Schaefer ---- tschaefe@mindspring.com --- http://www.inxutil.com -- -