RDBMS reliability on DEC Alpha OSF/1

We are presently using Informix 7.1 (ud1) on a central database server for a bond trading system. Our hardware is a DEC alpha 2100 (4 smp) running OSF/1 version 3.2. We have about 15 tables that are used for transactions, and most of them see transaction rates of about five inserts per minute. We do have one table, however, that must support roughly 15 updates per second all day long. We have about 80 customers that log in via a WAN from Wall Street, Chicago, and many other cities, that connect to the db. For reasons described below, we have decided to dump Informix and switch to either Sybase or Oracle. I am trying to find out if anybody out there is using either of these on a DEC Alpha running OSF/1 Unix, and what your experience has been. I'm not even looking for the fastest RDBMS in the world, I just want one that will stay up during business hours, under the transaction rates I described above. And I'd be particularly interested to hear if you have ever experienced a down database or other reliability problems with Sybase or Oracle on a regular basis. And anything else you might add about them. What follows is a rant about why we are ditching Informix... We have experienced some very serious problems with Informix, the worst being that the database engine crashes on a regular basis, about once each day. This causes us to have to halt trading while we bring the database engine back up, reconnect the clients, and figure out which orders and trades got dropped as a result of the failure. Needless to say, halting trading is not only expensive for us, but it has eroded our customers' confidence to the point where many of them have refused to trade on our system until Informix repairs the failures. All of our clients are bigshot market makers over on Wall Street and we would really like to stop pissing them off. At present I figure that using Informix is costing us several thousand dollars in lost business every day. Informix has acknowledged that the bug is theirs, but they have not been able, even after five months, to fix it. I can't tell if it's because they haven't tried, or because they are just not smart enough. But it is becoming increasingly clear (duh) that they are not going to fix it any time soon. I believe that Informix, both as a company and as a technology, is not equipped to support live financial trading systems like ours, and transaction processing systems in general. The bond market is much less active than other types of markets, like stocks or currencies, and I shudder to think how Informix would behave in one of those environments. I doubt it would survive the market open. ..end rant. Thanks heaps Gerry Tynen (gtynen@netcom.com) Development Manager BondNet Trading Systems Greenwich, CT