Re: Education Advice

Glen Sjoberg <ISSGES%BYUVM.BITNET@CORNELLC.cit.cornell.edu> writes: > Greetings...My name is Glen Sjoberg with Brigham Young University. We have > just recently finished an evaluation of several DBMS's that will run on > multiple platforms and particularly under UNIX. We came to the conclusion > that INFORMIX was the best choice for our needs. I have been the DBA for > our mainframe DBMS, DATACOM/DB, and I will now be supporting INFORMIX. To > begin with we will be getting INFORMIX-OnLine, INFORMIX-4GL and Compiler, > the Interactive Debugger, INFORMIX-SQL and INFORMIX-QuickStep. > > I have been looking over the Training Schedule to see what INFORMIX offers and > I have a couple of questions. > For those who have attended INFORMIX courses; > - Were the courses benefitial? > - Were your expectations met? > - What order do you suggest the courses be taken? > - Are there other alternatives that might be as good or better, ie. CBT, > books, etc...? NEC Information Systems Australia has just sent people on a couple of Informix courses. These were actually organised and run by Informix Software Australia, rather than by a dealer/distributor. We sent one person on a 5 day Informix 4GL course. His comments were: "The course was well oranised and run. The student materials were good - very professionally produced. Good hands on exercises were provided. The only problem I had with the course was that some attendees did not have enough UNIX experience to even use Vi and slowed the pace down. Overall the course was good value and worth attending." We sent five people to the first 4 day (normally 5 day) OnLine for DBA's course run in Australia. I was one of the attendees and my comments are essentially the same as those above. The presenter was Shirley Li, who is based in Singapore. She knew her material and was able to present it well. The class size was a little too large and some problems occurred initially as there weren't enough terminals. However, by the morning of the second day that had been rectified and Informix organised a extra staffer to assist with the hands on exercises. Regardless of the quality of the course over here, I strongly recommend hands on training for OnLine. The internals of the database are complex and you won't pick everything up simply by reading the manuals. Even though the manuals are generally good there are some omissions that the course covers. The order in which you take the courses depends on your prior experience. Informix recommend SQL then 4GL then OnLine which sounds about right. However, if you already have SQL experience with DB2, Oracle etc you may prefer to do the OnLine course straight up. One of our people had Oracle SQL experience but no Informix experience and coped with the course easily. I hope this helps to answer some of your questions. Regards, Ron Lees +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ron Lees | | NEC Information Systems Australia Pty Ltd | | Software Development Centre (Canberra) | | | | Email: rlees@pdact.pd.necisa.oz.au | | Snail: PO Box 244, Belconnen ACT 2616, AUSTRALIA | | Voice: + 61 6 251 6411 | | Fax: + 61 6 251 6947 | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+