Re: Informix Tech Support?
In article <6fu6ol$d28$1@news.xmission.com>,
"John S. Michael" <john.michael@flyingj.com> wrote:
>Roger Tomas wrote in message <352291C9.D4DD7C06@agcs.com>...
>>We're migrating an application from 5.x to 7.x and have had to call
>>Informix technical support a number of times lately. Support has
>>varied from none to lame. In one case, I emailed some information
>>to the support person and never got a response. In another case,
>>my question received a meaningless answer. In yet another case,
>>I could hear the support person flipping pages in a manual.
>>
>>Am I just unlucky or has Informix's technical support gone down
>>the tubes?
>>
>>Roger Tomas
>>AG Communication Systems
>
>
>My company has basically given up on getting any support from Informix.
>
>
>
This is a discussion thread I have wanted to see for quite some time.
My company has been using Informix since 1990, for the most part the
OnLine engine on HP9000 servers of various sorts. Our databases are
not huge as these things go, but we are somewhat unusual in that most
DSS queries result in joins across three tables, each of which
currently has over 100,000,000 rows. We do a lot of "how many
green widgets did Anycity process last month, compared to our
overall average the previous month and every other city's average
for last month and the same month last year" type questions. At the
same time, the database is supporting an OLTP environment that inserts
about 400,000 new rows into each of those three tables every day.
We frequently run into oddball problems - queries that never finish,
"assert failed - PANIC" type events, optimizer SNAFUs, and we are
constantly tweaking buffers, virtual processors, memory, kernel
parameters, and everything else in a desparate attempt to wring faster
processing. System currently is an HP9000 V2200 with 2 GIG RAM,
4 CPU, 64 bit HP/UX 11.0, 25 X 4 GIG disk on 5 FWSCSI II chains,
OnLine 7.23.UC1
I have _NEVER_ received _ANY_ exceptional assistance from Informix
Tech Support in the 8 years I've used them, and on a scale of 1 to 10
I would say they average about 2. That scale, by the way, has WRQ
at about a 9 and CheckFree at a 5, just for comparison.
I currently am waiting for an answer as to why I always get the
message "unknown error message 874" every time I try to set
pdqpriority. Error message text points at the optimizer, and
says to note conditions and call tech support. Fine. Conditions
are no one else is logged onto the damn host, I'm the only user,
I'm sitting in the ISQL window, no jobs/queries are running, and
I type set pdqpriority high. Or 100. Or low. Or whatever. Same
error message. Tech support asks me to fax them my onconfig, a
printout of onstat -a (which is huge), mayby try running oncheck
against each table and index (!!!) as "it might help", etc.
Look, I don't expect people to have an instant answer to a problem
when I call, but I do expect to talk to someone who has a clue. For
what I pay every year (and if I could convince the board that we
shouldn't be paying we wouldn't be, but they keep hearing that you
have to budget 15% for "software support", so we keep on spending...)
Anybody have better luck than we have?
Dazed and confused in Connecticut,
Ray Garrison