Upgrading from 12.10.FC3?

I'm thinking that it's about time to upgrade. In the recent year, I've run into a couple things that tech support says are probably fixed in newer releases, plus tech support told me that they do not have access to 12.10.FC3, and, therefore, could not attempt to replicate an issue I had. (An example of paying for tech support, but the tech support could not fully "deliver".) I wonder... given that we've waited so long, am I about to upgrade to 12.10.XC10, only to have a major release, soon? Of course, I realize that the folks here that really know are not at liberty to say. But, I wonder if there are any "public" rumors floating around as to a timeframe for a major release. Speculation welcome. DG

12.10.xC3 is quite old now (released over four years ago) and was an early release of 12.10. I don't know why support can't get hold of a copy but paying for support means access to the upgrades too. 12.10.xC11 is out now. While I'd always recommend testing, xC3 to xC10 or xC11 ought to be a straightforward change and it sounds like it would solve some of your issues. If a v13 were to appear soon after I don't see why it would matter too much. New features are being delivered with every fix pack under the continuous delivery model announced at a previous IIUG conference. I would speculate that at some point IBM/HCL could decide to increase the major version number instead of calling it a fix pack. However, this would be more of a marketing exercise or so that in the future they could drop support for 12.10.xC1 and other early fix packs. (Yes, the 'm' word was in that last sentence.)

David: IBM and HCL moved Informix to a continuous development model eventually planning a release roughly every 1-2 months which they are slowly ramping up to. The current release QAd and certified by HCL is 12.10.xC11 which IB IBM just certified and made available. As far as I know there are no specific plans for a major release for the near future. Also IBM is required by their own ULA to support three major releases which is why 11.50 has not gone out-of-support yet. If they want to de-support 11.50 they will eventually have to come out with a 12.50 or 13.00 or something, but not in the short term anyway. I have several clients on 12.10.FC10 and no reports of major gotchas. A few nice new features since .xC3 though. I have not tested .xC11 yet

Thank you, both, Benjamin and Art. Of course :) I realized that upgrades are included as part of support. I didn't doubt that for an instance. What (more than) annoyed us was that tech support was unable to support an Informix version that is currently "supported". (So, what, exactly does "support" mean, then?) They claimed not to have access to either a working system (for the supported product), nor access to the software. The worst thing was that they were unable to diagnose the problem. The best they could do was say that the problem might be fixed in a newer version. Due to big funding cutbacks in our state government, I have not been able to attend IIUG Conference for several years. I was unaware of the new Informix development and release model. It was probably also made known via methods other than the Conference, but I just wasn't paying enough attention. So, we will be upgrading sooner rather than later. DG

From FC8, IDS introduced EAR which required some structure changes hence no more rolling upgrade accros this. So if you want to do an online upgrade to an informix ha cluster, not possible to FC8-11 from older versions.