Re: Eperiences with Online under NT 4
Markus Wette wrote: > > Dear Sirs, > > I would like to know about experiences (good or bad) > with Informix-Online under Windows NT 4. > > Thanks in advance > Markus > -- > Markus Wette http://www.halstenbach.de > Halstenbach ACT GMBH Telefon.: +49 2261 9902-14 > Breidenbrucher Strasse 2 Fax.....: +49 2261 9902-99 > D-51674 Wiehl mailto:mkwt@halstenbach.de My experiences follow pretty much the other threads, however, I would like to add: ( warning: lond-winded observations follow ) 1. NT needs at least 64 Megabytes of memory to operate at the bare minimum, with Informix OWGS, the more the merrier, and you should have at least a Pentium 133 or faster. I have it on an EISA machine, SCSI hard drive, with a Pentium 133 CPU. Interestingly it performs faster than the 166 Mhz ISA IDE-based Pentiums I use. If you add the Livewire Pro components, and Enterprise Server 2.01, NT starts to get absent minded requiring more memory. It's a hog. OWGS has given me few problems. It's NT that requires care and feeding. 2. If you use Solaris x86, the same memory requirements as NT. Too bad OWGS isn't available for Linux. The latest Apache web server has API support for many different data bases, too bad Informix isn't heading for Linux. This would counter my claim that Informix is only interested in big gun corporate accounts. After all, DSA should include the small end machines as well as the big boxes. NT is not really for small systems--at least not cheap ones. If you want to be an Oracle, the small end makes up over 60% of the market. Most fishermen use quantity in their strategy, this time-tested approach could work for Informix. Microsoft/Oracle have seemed to have figured this out. 3. NT and Microsoft in general use vague meanings that require some fiddling and monkeying around with in order to get things right, or attend some training, and take lots of notes. Or buy lots of books. :-) 4. I've found the networking to be the biggest challenge, more so with NT and not Informix. Several books can help, one being the Advanced Technical Reference for NT 4.0 Workstation: ISBN 0-7897-0863-9 Que US $59.95. I bought it mistaking it as a reference for Server, but it still contains a lot of valuable information. 5. NT is also headed for Active X world domination, so for long term planning you may want to consider: - having 4.0 as your last NT rev, and stay third party as much as possible for data base components, web server, etc. such as Netscape and Informix. If you actually like Active X ignore this, otherwise think Java/Javascript. - switching to Solaris or other UNIX and staying with 7.x or OWGS for Solaris for a while till Informix figures out that most companies out there are not ready for Universal Server, and need time to take it serious--especially with the high price tag. Since most developers won't be able to get their hands on it, finding support for US will also be difficult for a while till people from the big gun shops bolt for work elsewhere after learning everything they can about US. US is primarily for intranet use--or for the new world most companies are not ready for. Most companies out there are just now figuring why an intranet would be a good idea. OWGS is a good inexpensive starting point going forward using a web-db interface. 6. OWGS is simple to administer, for me anyway, and has some pretty cool interfaces. SQLServer is trigger and stored procedure based for the administration, with lots of confusing bells and whistles, consistent with MS products. If you do not have that kind of experience you may like OWGS for that alone. Oracle has an old-world monster that requires three men and a dog to administer. Their web/httpd engine is also a beast. You have to do a lot of the administration for their web-server via command line, so requires some fiddling. Oracle also has bugs that <they> aren't even capable of managing at their customer service center, so you are on your own with Oracle. You may want to get a UNIX-command set like MKS Tool Kit or Softway Systems Open NT so you can have a Korn shell instead of that god-awful command.com NT provides. 7. The OWGS db-access interface looks just like the UNIX interface, however I hope in future releases they move it to a GUI instead of the old-world character-based app. I did not have to mirror my dbspaces to get a dbspace as the other post, but this could be that the latest Netscape Liverwire 1.0.1 download version may be different than the one from Informix. I've heard from Informix telling me there are subtle differences. My interest in OWGS is for intranet use, so the Livewire version captures my attention more than any other version. 8. Can't tell you how OWGS does on big data bases, but everything I'm hearing about it says it is faster than SQLServer. But there's no reason why you can't use both. I try to be objective as many of the sites I visit have both. I lean towards Informix but I expect them to pay attention to the competition. If they do, the prices for their products should be dropping, and the features should be improving as well. :-) -- Tim Schaefer tschaefe@mindspring.com