Re: Informix 4GL. A Future?

Hi Raj. In article <D7CJrL.1D2@txnews.amd.com> rsundara@dvorak.amd.com (Rajashekar Sundaramurthy) writes:>From: rsundara@dvorak.amd.com (Rajashekar Sundaramurthy) >Subject: Informix 4GL. A Future? >Date: Thu, 20 Apr 1995 18:38:08 GMT >Rich, >In one of your earlier messages you state that: >>Access and Delphi are reasonable >>products and can satisfy a broad set of application needs but have their >>limitations. However, I wouldn't vouch for the Informix ODBC connectivity >>links for either product. They are both really designed and tested for SQL >>Server (Microsoft and Sybase) and Oracle. For more complex applications I >From what I have read on Delphi, native drivers are available from >Borland for Oracle, Informix and Sybase. These drivers donot use ODBC. Yes, according to the documentation there are SQL direct drivers for Informix. However, it is not clear how much effort Borland put into any of its divers (the drivers for even Oracle and Sybase are not really well designed). Usually companies put most of their efforts into Oracle and Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server drivers since they represent the bulk of the client/server marketplace. It is very difficult to build optimized drivers and it looks like Borland left their's half-finished. >Also, I am not sure what you mean by 'ODBC connectivity links are optimized>for Oracle/Sybase but not for Informix'. I thought client apps could use any >ODBC compliant driver to access any ODBC data source. So if one driver was>slow, you could replace it with another ODBC compliant driver that is >more efficient. I don't think that any ODBC drivers are ever optimized. They are just a grab-bag of drivers which may or may not work or have any practical value. Kind of like a check list item. ODBC technology is fundamentally flawed since there is really no spec (there are just hundreds of different versions of ODBC), the spec is constantly changing, and each ODBC driver is just a black box with unknown functionality, performance behavior, and characteristics (a.k.a. bugs). I guess one can spend lots of time trying to find a good ODBC driver (whatever that means). I know of one development team that ended up using two! ODBC drivers in one application in order to get the application to work. Hope this answers your questions. The bottom line is that Informix has pretty much ignored the client/server workgroup arena and because of this it has very little market penetration. As a result most front-end tool vendors (all that I know of) pretty much ignore Informix when building their tool interfaces. Regards, Rich Richard Finkelstein, Performance Computing, Inc.