Re: Informix vs. Oracle

mathews@bones.ecs.umass.edu (Mathew J Mathews) writes: >My boss was recently told by a salesman that Informix would soon be the new >RDBMS standard on top of Oracle. Needless to say, she asked me to investigate. >I have not been able to find very much written on Informix. Could anyone >give me their 2 cents, and/or point me to a good source of info? I say this is a typical salesperson BS. Oracle is out in the lead by far, especially because Informix has ignored or abandoned important market sectors like VAX/VMS. Informix is a Unix DBMS; Oracle is on loads of platforms. Oracle is integrating their DBMS with lots of applications; does Informix sell anything but the DBMS. And lastly, Oracle has a great marketing department, although their hype caught up with them last summer when some of their accounting practices like premature recording of sales and penchant for vaporware became exposed. How else could such a mediocre product have captured so much of the market? If the salesperson meant that Informix would overtake Oracle as a technical standard, well, Oracle never was a technical leader, except in their ability to get their product to run on a spectrum of platforms, and it's not gaining on competitors like Ingres and Sybase technically, either. Seth Grimes, dcatlas!sethg@uunet.uu.net Automated Sciences Group (U.S. Dept. of Transportation)