Re[2]: Changing from Informix to Oracle

My personal opinion on Migration to O from I as is follows Having worked with mutiple databases I do not agree with a statement that Informix is slower than Oracle. - First of all why do you want to migrate ? Cost / Response time /or both ? One can not make a statement that informix writes are slow unless a benchmarking on the same platform (hardware/application) is done with both the databases. If writes are slower than expected performance levels then diagnose and go for more cache or high speed disks. All RDBMS deploy similar techniques and their comparative performance levels are more or less in the same range. ( I never noticed 1:2 level performance differences in whatever benchmarking I pesonally did ). - No comments on cost issues as these are deals. But I would like to add following points while calculating costs apart from DBMS licensing. HR costs are same ( DBA etc ) DBMS specific application migration cost. Eg. informix stored procedures are syntactically different than Oracle stored procedures. Informix 4GL based application need new development. Downtime and contingency plan cost In-house staff training cost. - Generally Informix is a very good engine and operationally lucid and simple and a good choice for engine based applications - Oracle has lot of applicattion development tools support around the engine and hence this is a good choice for application oriented DBMS choices. To illustarate few, Oracle got a very good java based XSQL support through which XML documents can be generated or populated into the database on fly using XSQL. Likewise Application partitioning is another good feature that Oracle has. To illustrate further, to tune client/server applications ( developed in Oracle) code blocks can be move from client-2-server / server-2-client on fly ( drag and drop) as the code is written in PL-SQL blocks Being a consultant on databases, I thought I would share this info with you guys. Cheers Ram ____________________Reply Separator____________________ Subject: Re: Changing from Informix to Oracle Author: mars1972@my-deja.com Date: 7/20/00 1:19 PM In article <964093538.23065.0.nnrp-13.d4e5c55a@news.demon.co.uk>, "Pankaj" <pankaj.patel@punks.demon.co.uk> wrote: > > Hi , > > Do not know if this would help but here goes anyway. > > Questions I would want to know the answer to first > > 1. Have the suits tried to find out if they can get a corporate deal with > Informix to cover all sites and reduce costs ? It may not be as fantastic > as Oracle but it might reduce costs. > Definitely a good suggestion. I've gotten deals before... > 2. How much will it cost to migrate ? You have all the issues of migration > across as pointed out by Obnoxio which means time, cost, headache and new > learning curve plus the price of Oracle DBA's > This one's hard to sell to suits in my experience, because it's not 'hard' money. I've always had a hard time convincing them that they pay me... > 3. How much will cost not to migrate ? if you do NOT migrate. None of the > point mentioned above. Only maybe the cost of a consultant ,IF you do not > have time to resolve problem(S). > Good question. I actually would have put it earlier in the list... > 4. The current deal that Oracle is giving . How long are you going to pay > That " Fantastic price deal" before it goes up or changes( If it changes or > goes up at all). > > 5. Finally Is Oracle trying to win another Informix customer by giving thier > product away ? Guess they can do that as they do own a large majority of the > database market. > For all the differences between Microsoft's and Oracle's respective creators, they do do things similarly, don't they? > The last one is only a slight bias towards Informix. > I don't have a bias towards Informix. I have a bias against everything else! > Pankaj > > Boscia wrote in message ... > >I work at a large company with a corporate headquarters that tries to tell > >us what to do.... > > > >Well, we use Informix for all but one of our databases. We use Oracle for > >the one. > > > >Corporate is suggesting that we switch all our databases to Oracle. > >Corporate got some fantastic price deal and pays for it on the corporate > >level and each individual location does not have to pay for any Oracle > >software or support. We pay over $150K for our Informix apps at our > >location only, so of course this looks good to some. > > > >Can anyone tell me if we go this route, how hard is it to convert? > >And if you can give me any ammunition to use to convince why or why not... > > > >We have many & quite large databases now - with one of the tables having > >over 115 million rows. Right now we are getting slow writes when we select > >and write into temp tables and everyone is claiming Informix is causing > the > >slowness and if we had Oracle, it would not do that. > >(I feel Informix is causing the slowness & I am in the process of > "tweaking" > >, but I don't know enough about Oracle to know how they do their select > >statements and temp tables....or their disks or for that matter anything at > >all.....) > > > >And unfortunately, we have no Oracle DBA to ask.... > > > > > >Any help would sure be appreciated.. > > > >Thanks > > > >Robin > > > > > > -- # unrm / ksh: unrm: not found # man cpio Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.