Note to CY RE: Senior Oracle DBA now Learning InformixbyRequestofCompany

Cy, For some reason I'm not getting all of the news via the gateway. (Is it Hotmail?) But to answer your questions: -=- Informix database == Oracle schema Oracle combines the schema and user into one pseudo-entity? -=- Sort of. Yes the database and the schema are the same, however you don't have the pseudo entity. (Which is a royal pain to deal with.) -=- Is there an owner then for Informix objects? Or does each user haves grants to the objects that were originally created by what ever user? -=- Yes. You have the user Informix who can own objects, or the user who created the database can own the objects. (Individual users can be given privileges on a given database/schema and own the objects.) The user goes back to the Unix user ID that you log in / authenticate against. So I can create a database sales, with the owner fred. Then fred can grant privileges to sue, sally and nate.... -=- BTW, I was looking at the job market for Informix DBAs. Not good. And lower pay than an Oracle DBA if you can find a job doing Informix. Me thinks I need to stick with Oracle as my bread and butter although Informix is vastly superior technically. -=- The job market is skewed. You will find that the Informix market is pretty mature and that most companies already have a couple of DBAs on staff and some prefer to train their own rather than purchase them from the outside. You will also find that a single Informix DBA can handle more than an Oracle DBA. That is, you need fewer Informix DBAs to keep things afloat. There is definitely more Oracle work out there. However, from what I've seen, the majority of the Oracle DBAs that are *certified* couldn't grok what or how a relational database works. (YMMV) -=- If it is so good, then why isn't IBM pushing hard for market share? -=- Now that's a loaded question. You have to understand a bit of the history. Informix has had a couple of CEOs since its inception. Roger Sippl ?sp?, Phil White, Finocchio, Dexmier, Gynes, then IBM. (Now I'm showing my age. ;-) Phil White was a decent CEO until he got caught cooking the books. (He did a lot of other things right and had a vision of the future.) The bozos who replaced Phil, (Finocchio and Dexmier) didn't grok Informix or the RDBMS market. Hence they drove Informix down. Dexmier bought Ardent and when things got worse, Peter Gynes the former CEO of Ardent, took over. He split the company in to two pieces and sold off the database business to IBM for a billion. (It was really worth 2 billion, but it was a fire sale....) IBM bought Informix for two things. 1) Its technology. 2) Its marketshare. Informix held some pretty cool patents that were/are pretty important if you're looking forward... As to market share, while Finocchio and Dexmier screwed things up, Informix still had a decent market share. You have to understand that DB2 was Janet P's baby. Hence her first love. There's a lot more I can say on this, however.... well you know the saying. ;-) You have to also understand that there was this "vision" that you could combine DB2 and IDS aka Arrowhead. Only that wasn't possible. (Its a lot harder than everyone thought.) So you now have a bunch of loyal Informix customers who know that 1) TCO is lower than Oracle and DB2. 2) IDS runs well and stays up. 3) IDS isn't going anywhere so why look at retooling for a zero sum gain? What's the future? Well IMHO, the more databases that you grok, the better job potential exists. But hey! What do I know? ;-) _________________________________________________________________ Visit MSN Holiday Challenge for your chance to win up to $50,000 in Holiday cash from MSN today! http://www.msnholidaychallenge.com/index.aspx?ocid=tagline&locale=en-us