Arguments to support INFORMIX vs. Oracle
In our university hospital, we've been more or less happily using INFORMIX database products on Siemens computers for the last 5 or six years. Meanwhile, we have arrived at the 4.1 release level, with various difficulties when upgrading between releases, but these could mostly be overcome. Since INFORMIX is not supported on Macintosh computers, our central computing department has been introducing ORACLE two years ago, and now they are putting pressure on us to convert from INFORMIX to ORACLE with all our applications. We are presently buying a number of SUN Sparcs and are in the process of deciding which database program to install on these. The ORACLE supporters say that their product is supported on more plat- forms and by more other software that INFORMIX. For instance, you can access ORACLE data directly from EXCEL and SPSS, which they say you can't do with INFORMIX. This is of course an argument, because many users in our environment use these programs on their PC and would greatly benefit if they could access these data directly (over our TCP/IP network). I am very reluctant to switch to ORACLE, since my colleagues and I have collected quite a bit of practical INFORMIX experience and know-how, and the applications we have developed over the years with I4GL and ISQL would be very hard to migrate to anything offered by ORACLE. So I am now looking for more arguments to support our point of view. Does anybody know whether: - there is a way to access INFORMIX data directly out of EXCEL or SPSS - access ORACLE data from INFORMIX-frontends? - INFORMIX is available on MACs? Any other info why INFORMIX is preferable over ORACLE welcome. I hope there will be enough supporting arguments for INFORMIX. I'd hate to have to switch! Regards, Richard -- +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------+ | Dr. Richard Spitz | INTERNET: spitz@ana.med.uni-muenchen.de | | EDV-Gruppe Anaesthesie | Tel : +49-89-7095-3421 | | Klinikum Grosshadern | FAX : +49-89-7095-8886 | | Munich, Germany | | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------+