Changing from Informix to Oracle

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

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. 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 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). 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. The last one is only a slight bias towards Informix. 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 > >

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.

Oracle has what they call migration kits and there is one for Informix to Oracle (it mentions all of the major Informix releases too). From what I understand, the technical aspect of migrating is not a big deal. Also, Informix has a migration tool to migrate from Oracle to Informix, so don't be outraged that such a tool exists. Regards, Bill Border Agilent Technologies (Opinions expressed here are my own) bill_border@agilent.com Effective, Affordable Informix/Oracle Monitor: http://dbamon.com 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 > >

Hi Robin, > 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've recently migrated a rather large application (10 MB C++ source code) accessing the database via ODBC from Informix to Oracle. Because only a small part of the code deals with DB access it took only around two weeks to accomplish that. But we benefitted from the use of ODBC and some kind of database framework. The database contains maybe 100 tables. Converting their structure and data was not too difficult as well. We unloaded the data into files, converted them with some kind of text replacement tool before importing them into Oracle. The greatest amount of work, was to make all those triggers and stored procedures work on Oracle. The are small but signifiacant differences in the SQL dialects caused a lot of additional expenses (procedures cannot return more than 1 value, CURRENT <-> SYSDATE, no SERIALs). Some of them had to be completly rewritten and tested again. Overall it took us more than 3 month of work to accomplish that. The worst part is, that we have to maintain both versions in the future. So if we make a new extension DB script for Informix we have to translate it to Oracle as well. So if you have to deal with this issue or have a large amount of stored procedures, I would not recommend to try it for a vague chance to have a better performance. Mit bestem Gruss, Marcus. -- Marcus.Gelleschun, ProSieben Information Service GmbH Gutenbergstr. 3, D-85767 Unterfoehring, Tel: 089/9507-5149