Re: Is Informix Reliable?

In article <6ajuq7$8lv@cssun.mathcs.emory.edu>, Billy Wheeler <billy@west.co.za> writes >My favourite SE story was when I walked into a cellular service >provider who was complaining about bad month-end run performance on >their multi-gigabyte (+-30GB) database. I had my copy of the OnLine 7 >performance tuning guide in my briefcase and ready to rock. Imagine >my surprise when I found out they weren't running OnLine anything! >And they had individual .dat and .idx files in excess if 1GB... > >What is a recurring problem, in my experience, is index corruption; >however, bcheck has always fixed this. It's also generally easy to >spot! :-) > Tell me about it! We have a customer with a 1.5Gb standard engine database and tables >500Mb! Award of the day goes to a certain site. Managed to lose files at random when rebooting and fsck'ing a partition containing an SE database AND NEVER TOLD US. Eventually they lost the main table for their database with 1000's of records. Of course they have a backup? NOOO! xGb of files does not fit on a <xGb tape! Guess what? For several months no-one checked the backups were working!! They have plenty of things on the tape EXCEPT their database. They are now going to have to reenter most the fields for several 10,000's records by hand!! And we send data from each record to another system which has it's own reference for each record. Of course the other system never sees our reference so even though we can recover some fields of this monster table from an audit table they will have to match up probably >50,000 partial records from our system with the other system which includes invoice and accounting information!!]. FUN!!! -- David Williams Maintainer of the Informix FAQ Primary site (Beta Version) http://www.smooth1.demon.co.uk Official site http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html I see you standin', Standin' on your own, It's such a lonely place for you, For you to be If you need a shoulder, Or if you need a friend, I'll be here standing, Until the bitter end... So don't chastise me Or think I, I mean you harm... All I ever wanted Was for you To know that I care