Informix/Oracle

I've come late to this and there were many other excellent replies, many focussing on the facts and some on more subjective views of vendor culture. I'm a reseller of both products and am neutral really, although I would say that I have a technical preference for Informix, and IBM's software reseller programme, though not perfect, is in my experience the best in the business at rewarding its *value-added* resellers bar none. On the specific points: - IBM does not have a road map for Informix, making it a stagnant product and there is a possibility of little to zero support for Informix. As pointed out, this simply isn't true. Maybe (certainly!) IBM is doing nowhere near enough to promote Informix and maybe therefore it is reaping what it has sown in respect of perceptions of this sort, but IBM does have a long and honourable track record of supporting its products and giving long notice if that is ever to change, and does have a comprehensive road map for Informix as far into the future as it has for *any* of its products, DB2 included. - High availability is an issue for Informix, therefore if RAF regards the Informix DB as mission critical then they might want to have it available 24/7. As also pointed out, this generally isn't true either. Informix HDR, RSS and SDS are all good HA technologies. Other users get ER to do a job for them too. We might argue about pros and cons: I would be pleased to be corrected but I don't think updateable SDSs have quite the functionality of Oracle RAC, but overall Informix's offerings is at least on a par with Oracle's See also the point below about licensing rules. - The abovementioned points are usually the reason why a customer would consider moving to Oracle database Doubtless there are reasons why some customers might consider Oracle over Informix, but I don't think either roadmap or technology are valid ones. Finally, as Ben Thompson pointed out, IBM software rules generally, including Informix, are exceptionally generous relative to Oracle's in the areas of licensing standby or DR servers; and "sub-capacity" licensing (running Informix on a VM and paying only for the cores assigned to the VM and not the underlying host(s). In my opinion THIS is one of IBM's killer arguments in favour of Informix (or DB2), though strangely I rarely hear it articulated by IBM sales teams. HTH Neil