Re: Informix on Digital

Peter Tashkoff wrote: > > Morning Folks > Anyone out there running Informix over Digital that > would care to comment on their experiences to us? > We are presently evaluating hardware vendors to > replace our existing systems and have a kind of nice > looking high availability solution presented from Digital > for twin AlphaServer 4100's, each 3 CPU at 466 MHZ > with DECsafe cluster. > We would be running Informix 7.2x over this. > > All replies would be treated as confidential. > TIA. > Peter Tashkoff <tashkop@zespri.co.nz> > Zespri International Limited > Zespri New Zealand Kiwifruit, The Worlds Finest. It is quite fast, and the support for Very Large Memory is great if you are going to have huge shared memory segments. However, there are some known bugs which can hurt you; I have a customer in Lima, Peru who wanted to migrate our application from OnLine 5.06 to DSA 7.20 and we found the following problems: 1. If you have 4GL applications, they will only connect to the engine via sockets, unless you have the special 7.22FC4p2 or above installed; the documentation for 7.22FC4 states that it will work through shared memory... not true! You need to ask for 7.22FC4p2 or higher. 2. On versions 7.20 through 7.22FC4 there is a bug while using scroll cursors that makes them return an unexpect error code -405 instead of the good-old -100 when no rows are found :-) 3. The tools (4GL and ISQL) are VERY, VERY slow while compiling! 4. If you have Digital Unix 3.2[a-g] you will have problems with the socket interface; there's a bug in the operating system that makes then slower than usual. Get 3.2h or a set of five patches suggested by Informix. 5. If you have Digital Unix 4.0, quit! It's buggy, slow managing shared memory and will give you overall performance problems. Wonder what our client did? They went back to OnLine 5.08 and are quite happy with it :-) They have about 200+ users via shared memory, and some 50 users via sockets on a 768Mb RAM, 3 way 300Mhz AlphaServer with a 12 Gb database; there are ten really big tables (half a million records each) that are accessed frequently. I guess you should test your environment very carefully. -- Ernesto Hern'ndez-Novich - emhn@telcel.net.ve Just another Unix/Perl/Java hacker. One thing is to be the best, and another is to be the most popular. Unix: Live free or die!