Re: Informix & Visual Basic

> Jim Oles <oles@magicnet.net> writes: > I am interested in accessing a backend database serve with Informix. > I'd like to do some timings that compares access speed with and without > ODBC. This will be through a VB front-end ! > > Do I need special Informix drivers to do this ? For ODBC you need nothing special from Informix if you use OpenLink or SQL-Retriever ODBC drivers. Most other ODBC drivers will require I-Net on the PC. Informix CLI includes both an ODBC driver and I-Net. If you use I-Net on the PC you may need somthing on the server depending on the version of the db engine. If your Informix is ver. 6.0 or later you need nothing on the server, if it is older you need an extra cost option from Informix called I-Star. But what do you meen with and without ODBC. Using VB without ODBC and connecting to an Informix database would meen going directly to I-Net which is Informix's native driver under Windows. May be there is a DLL with a puplished API in I-Net that you can use directly from VB. If not you would need ESQL/C from Informix as well and write you own DLL that you can call from VB. (I actually seem to remember someone mentioning here at c.d.i that they had done something like that, but I may be wrong.) According to earlier reports people have found only a few percent difference in accessing Informix via I-Net and an ODBC driver that uses I-Net. From that I would assume using something like OpenLink or SQL-Retriever you would get better performance with ODBC than using I-Net. The difference between different ODBC drivers may be larger than between some ODBC drivers and using I-Net directly so you should include that in your tests. Also performance isn't everything. Stability, ease of installation and functionality may be more important. If you do go ahead with your tests *please* report your results. They would be very interesting for us. Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no NM Data AS, Postbox 9090, Gronland, 0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company