Re: Informix Universal Server

CPeries@dynasty.com ("Peries, Chaminda") wrote: :Hi folks ! : :I am interested in finding out weather the Universal Server will be :widely adopted as a next generation database server. So Please feel free :to share your thoughts. : :How well was the Universal Server received by the Informix user :community when it was introduced ?. It's introduced, but not generally available yet. That will happen in a month or so. Until then Informix only sell it in a package with a significant amount of consulting included. This makes it effectively inaccessible to most of us. It's also currently only available on Sun and SGI making it even more expensive to use. :What percentage has switched over ? Essentially noone. See above. There are perhaps 500 to 1000 users. Some of them seems to have been very successfull. : What percentage has serious plans of switching over in the near future :? Probably not too many. Informix have done an incredibly bad job of explaining why people should. That may be changing a little. This years presentation at the user conference by Phil White was the first time ever I heard about Universel Server without multimedia or other fancy datatypes beeing mentioned in the same sentence. The key features that will make Universeal Server interesting for everybody are simple datatypes that aren't in standard SQL, functions on these datatypes as well as new functions on existing datatypes, the ability to create indexes on such functions. Examples may be a datetype with all 30 day months for interest calculatios, a spacial datatype (longitude/latitude) for customer location, soundex/metaphone functions with local language support for searching, name/adress normalisation functions. The list of both datatypes and functions goes on and on and on without having to touch multimedia or any other fancy things that few need right now. :Or do you anticipate those who don't require datablade technology to :hold on to Informix 7.x. for an extended period ? I anticipate everybody to need datablade technology even now, but few relize it and I expect it to be a long time before they do. When, if ever, they will change over depends a lot on Informix as well. It's both a question of how well they will be able to explain it as what availability and price there will be. The pricing issue is key to me. If Informix understood that everybody essentially need Universal Server and could be made to buy it they could and should sell it at the same price (or lower) as the 7.x versions now. If they did they could cover the market. They could make everybody want it and want it fast. That would be a major setback to every other database vendor as there are noone who now supply the technology nor are there anyone who are expected to be able to do it for quite some time. Oracle 8 doesn't do much significant in this area. Sybase is far from having anything. MS SQL Server is trying to use OLE DB - hardly a viable solution. Ingres - development in this direction stopped. IBM DB2 - the nearest competitor and only one with a similar technology. As I understand it however extensions are hard to write and mainly done by IBM themselves. If Informix makes the Universal Server widely and easily available to developers I think we will start to see some real creativity. The NT version may be key to this (available late 97 as I understand it). Until then we will have to wait and see. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org