Re: Senior Oracle DBA now Learning Informix by Request of Company:IThought Informix was Dead?

Mark Townsend wrote: > elanleblanc@yahoo.com wrote: > >> Oracle DBA's work much harder than Informix DBA's, at least on database >> administration duties. You deserve the extra pay. >> >> Informix DBA's spend more time joshing on CDI and developing software >> and heaven knows what else. > > > This is an old chestnut. It's never been proven that Informix is easier > to own or operate than Oracle. PLEASE STOP! Laughing that hard causes me pain! Do you know of ANY Oracle sites that are running 2000, 4000, 8000, or even 20000 server instances on geographically dispersed sites running mission critical databases with 20 or 15 or even 10 DBAs? I know of Informix shops that are doing just that. All of the top retailers are running Informix instances in their stores and in their central offices distributing and gathering data across thousands of servers. (Interestingly enough thet're all my favorite places to shop since long before I'd known why they ran so well.) Most days no one need do anything about it. Most of the phone switches in this country are collecting call data using an Informix instance. Soon almost every switch on the Internet will be using an Informix database embedded inside. Do these organizations have a DBA for each one of them? For even one for each small number of them? Running to and fro across the country non-stop fighting fires? No! A few DBAs to plan and implement upgrades and tuning improvements and they all spend 1/2 their days tuning applications and SQLs and ignoring the engines. When I ran all of our Informix servers with one assistant we had more IDS instances than we have Oracle instances now. We now have several times that many DBAs to manage the Oracle and DB2 instances we are running. There are probably 4x as many Informix instances today than there were when I passed the job on and today we still have only one DBA assigned to monitor, tune, port data, apply schema updates, and monitor server health of those instances each day (rotating slot). The rest of the team is busy keeping the other vendor's servers running smoothly. Come to think of it, for the first 6 months after I handed off the job, noone was doing it and NOTHING WENT WRONG. I know because I was still on call for problems that first year. Didn't get a single 3AM phone call. So give up the examples of lean mean Oracle shops or stop making me laugh. Art S. Kagel