Informix and Arc/INFO

I am interested in hearing of experience with implementations of Informix with the ARC/INFO GIS. Although we currently practice some use of Informix with ARC/INFO here in the Geography department of UMCP, we are thinking of expanding the capability and wonder what payoffs we can expect for additional software (namely, INFORMIX-STAR and 4GL) and additional personnel and training. We are currently using ISQL 4.10 with OnLine 5.03 running on a single machine, as the RDBMS for two projects in our Geography department. Users have to rlogin to the machine to make their queries; this requires that the one machine often be running not only Informix but also ARC/INFO for each user; this arrangement gets us suboptimal performance as well as the inconvenience of rlogin. (There is no limitation on ARC/INFO since we have a university-wide site license and multiple servers.) At present the department does not find it reasonable to shell out thousands of dollars for INFORMIX-STAR and 4GL for the sake of the two current projects; however, if we were to extend the user base to other projects--several of them also using ARC/INFO, several others using image processing software, and some using both--I am sure we would need these tools. Any suggestions? Feel free to email me for more details, thanks. Mark Heinicke Department of Geography University of Maryland at College Park mheinick@Glue.umd.edu