DSA follies

Hi. I've been fighting now for two months with a problem. I'm hoping that somebody else has run into a similar problem and has a workaround. I have an ESQL/C program that declares a cursor with hold and then performs an inner loop to do some updates to various other tables. The problem is that beginning with a migration to an HP 9000 K420 with 4 CPUs, I find that the query on the outer hold cursor isn't being parallelized, where it once was on the older Unisys PTX machine. The HP has Informix 7.22.UC1, the Unisys 7.10.UC5. Frankly, this old Unisys machine, several generations out of date (the 4 CPUs are 33 Mhz. Pentium chips, for example) is much faster on these types of queries than the new HP. I have checked, and found that (a) PDQPRIORITY is being set (verified via onstat -g mgm); (b) the optimizer is allocating a correct number of threads for my query (in this case, 5, again verified by onstat -g mgm), and finally, onsat -u reports that there is (guess what?) only a single thread being allocated for this query. On the old PTX box, once again, it allocated sufficient threads, verified by the same onstat outputs as shown here. Support is now stating that this is not a bug, but a feature...apparantly parallelizing a hold cursor is "too dangerous." Besides, there is no version of DSA that permitted this to be parallelized in such a fashion, according to them. When I pointed out that the 7.10 on PTX did, it became "oh, then try setting your isolation level to..." Been there, done that, no luck. Now I'm off on yet another support engineer, but I get the impression that these poor guys are having to toe the company line here without giving their true feelings in the matter. John and Andy are both fine engineers, and this is NOT a slam on them, but...I'm stuck in the middle. Has anybody else run into this? I can reproduce at will on my HP, but am tired of having to support two database machines for one database...the production jobs overload the capacity of the HP (and there aren't too many, folks!) so I have to run the two in sync. This wouldn't be too bad, but Informix isn't paying for the upkeep of this old box, and it is on its last legs with no maintenance support available. Sigh. Thanks, David Coburn Sr. DBA World Vision