Summary of responses: Client/Server Application

In article <1992Jul1.001333.19637@quintus.com>, nair@quintus.com (Anil Nair) writes: > I am sure some of you out there have set up some > real client/server applications using the numerous > Informix products. Could you please expound on some > of your experiences? Thanks to the few people who responded describing their applications and configurations. I will summarise the answers I got to my questions without directly quoting any of the people who responded to me. > My setup is quite simple. I have a network of machines > with NFS. I want to run an Informix On-Line database server > on a server machine. And I want to run my client processes > (ISQL or ESQL/C applications) on different machines on the network. The consensus answer was: You need Informix Star along with Informix OnLine on the server side. And you can use Informix-Net or Informix Star on the client side. To run Informix-Star or Informix OnLine the machine has to be configured with shared memory. If you are using Informix-Net on the client side, then you have to install it in a different directory from the one in which Informix-OnLine and Informix-Star is installed. And you have to set INFORMIXDIR appropriately. Both Informix Star and Informix have to be of the same version. And on the client side you cannot have a more recent major release of Informix-Star. Informix also recommends the above setup. But one person responded saying all I needed was Informix-Net. And it is true, as long as you dont need the capabilities of talking to two distributed databases, you dont need Informix-Star. The secret is to use the SQLEXEC environment variable. Once again thanks for the replies. It was a lot more informative and useful than Informix teksup. In general from the few responses I got, people seemed happy about Informix-Star and Informix-Net for networking client/server applications with Informix. Personally, I think having two processes to go from your client process to the database engine, is two too many. But after getting over my initial teething problems I am quite comfortable with using Informix for client/server applications now. Anil Nair