Re: INFORMIX XPS

singhh@vrinet.com wrote: > > Hello all! > > We have a about 5 DEC Alpha's running UNIX 3.2G. We are currently running > INFORMIX 7.12 on the servers. > > We are looking into INFORMIX XPS to create a virtual database on these 5 > servers. Is there anyone who is using INFORMIX XPS? Any experiences OR > details, performance issues? Where can I find more info. on it? > > I looked at INFORMIX's web-site but didn't find much > > TIA > > Harry Harry, XPS is for large data bases, usually in the context of data warehousing. I use XPS every day. It is the best data warehouse engine on the market. XPS has a limited feature set as far as end-user features when compared to the 7.x and 9.x engines. This is one of the reasons it is fast. Don't put your expectations of a virtual data base being several 7.x servers linked together as something that XPS would provide. It is similar, but not very. XPS is not a trivial installation, and requires planning and staging. The engine itself is simple, but only in the context of a single server. When used with the XMF software to cluster the engines together it becomes a true shared-nothing data base system. If one of the nodes go down, the data on the disks for that system is simply unavailable, but the system as a whole stays up. Other products out there that do not take advantage of shared nothing do not share in this joy. You can find more information about XPS and how it works by reading the book "Parallel Systems in the Data Warehouse", Prentice-Hall. Sorry I don't have the ISBN number. There's a great write-up about XPS in the book and enough information to help you understand what shared-nothing and NUMA architectures are about. Contact your Informix SE for explicit requirements for your platform(s). I look forward to seeing XPS on Linux, perhaps that Cobalt Cube would be a great place to start. XPS is a great product for the right application, usually data warehousing. Compared to Oracle, Informix has done the best job all around, staying true to not only shared-nothing, but also classic data warehousing concepts. It is scalable, and I know it is being used in some very big, important ways out there. It is difficult for me to work on single server machines after running XPS. The difference in performance is profound. :-) Thanks, Tim - -- Tim Schaefer --- tschaefe@mindspring.com -- http://www.inxutil.com -