Re: Gripe-- Bad SQL syntax can crash server. And... PA still stinks.

"byrdfarmer" <byrdfarmer@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:5e52df43.0405130849.711585f7@posting.google.com... > I know this isnt much help, but I think its a small group of tech > support folks that have trouble with the passport thing. I have ran > into the EXACT same situation four times now and its always 1 of 2 > people -I starting writing down their names-that I am half way tempted > to post! In my experience it isn't. The technicians just do as they are instructed. IBM has to strike a balance between providing a service to genuine customers and witholding it from those customers who make a decision to let it lapse. As an IBM Business Partner specialising in Informix services we attract a *lot* of support calls from customers in the latter category: there are *many* customers out there with no support. Of course, when they're in the deep brown stuff they suddenly want it, and IBM has to adopt a tough attitude. So I'd be surprised if individual technicians are unhelpful in this respect. That said, I do sympathise with your situation as a genunine customer having your credenials queried. It happens all over: I have a customer who renewed support in December but, despite five months and perhaps 20 emails, plus intervention from UK support and from the salesman, we cannot get PA updated to reflect their entitlement, so they too have initial problems raising v9 calls. But that's an IBM admin issue, not the fault of the technician. > To be honest though, even when I get through to techsupp, I > am rarely happy with the service because I hardly ever get any real > answers, Again, my experience with UK support does not bear this out. We find that the standards are generally as high as those of the pre-IBM days. Of course to an extent the support is only as good as the technician who fields your call, and people come and go and new people need to be trained and get experience etc, but I have never found it hard to get quick and accuarte support when I really needed it, pre- or post-IBM. > especially if its a performance issue. Well, to be fair, performance issues must be the devil's own job to fix, and tech support people must dread them. To get to the bottom of a support issue needs a holistic view of what's going on that is very, very difficult to provide via a remote support call. And let's generalise a bit here: Informix has more tuning capability than most databases, but it's difficult to REALLY screw it up by accident. Most performance issues when it comes down to it are caused by poorly thought-out application or database design, or transaction logic. I lose count of the amount of times that I argue with an IT business manager that the 4-second response times are because the application is crap. They simply don't want to believe that the '2 million development is flawed. They want to believe that you have fogotten to set the GOFAST=1 onconfig parameter ... So before you slag off the support people for being unhelpful over performance issues, please consider how difficult a problem that is to diagnose remotely. cheers Neil