Overall unstableness of Informix

We have had an Informix (7.12.UC2) database running on an HP for over a year. We have been utterly disappointed with it. It crashes about once-a-week. We run a lot of batch work against it using New Era for Motif, which is responsible for many of the crashes. How a programming language can crash the database engine is beyond me. Often times a small batch job will hit the engine so hard, that everyone else in the database times out. We can't use PDQ, because it crashes the database, or causes strange things to happen. We have a dual processor HP Model K. Our database fits into RAM (we have 512MB). We have dual port fast and wide SCSI, with about 6 GB storage. A relatively small database, on a fast machine, but we get very poor performance. We have had Informix out here at least every 6 months, and nothing gets fixed, which makes the $5000 bill hard to swallow. Even HP doesn't understand he performance Is this typical? Does everyone have these problems? Perhaps we are on the wrong platform? Is Informix just this bad? Should we switch to Oracle or another database? We went to a user group meeting and laughed when Informix told us about the datablades. We can't even get the normal version to work. We feel we can get better performance from an NT quad Pentium Pro, running SQL server. This is not practical for as large as we expect to grow, but the fact that they can honestly be compared is scary. What to do.