Re: Informix and DEC (Alpha and Digital Unix)?

Bill Jaeger writes: -> ->Howdy! -> ->We're looking to replace an RS/6000 running Online v5.0x with a new machine and ->Online v7.x. One of the platforms that we're looking at is the DEC Alpha ->running Digital Unix. Informix says that they don't consider DEC to be a ->"first tier" vendor, and that releases/fixes are typically longer in coming for ->a DEC platform as opposed to HP/IBM/Sun. -> ->How bad can we expect this lag to be? Does anyone have any horror stories ->about Informix on an Alpha? Bill, When we started out with Informix products, we were on a non-tier 1 platform. When the decision was made to move to a new platform, one of our major considerations was moving to a Tier 1 platform and I am glad we went this route. While I liked Informix products on our non-tier 1 platform, there are several disadvantages. First, new releases are available sooner on Tier 1 platforms and they are debugged more quickly. Tier 1 platforms tend to have more users. More users means more people testing out the products and turning in bug reports faster. The bugs seem to get fixed more quickly. Also, we were working on a platform which was unpopular enough that Informix was about to stop porting new releases to it at all. Now we don't have to worry about our platform being outmoded (at least not for quite some time) and we get better support from Informix. Also, some features such as dbcockpit and shared libraries are only available on certain platforms, and I believe these platforms tend to be more of the Tier 1 platforms than other platforms. On the other hand, if you get enough users to buy and use DEC Alphas, it may become a Tier 1 platform... Regards, - Cathy -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cathy Kipp e-mail: ckipp@vth1.vth.colostate.edu Phone: (970) 491-1294 Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital Fax: (970) 491-1205