Re: character-based tools on NT?

Joe Lumbley wrote: > > I've recently installed 7.22 ODS on Windows 4.0 and was very surprised > to find that onmonitor is no longer included on the CD. Since it's a 4GL- > based application, just copying an executable from an older system does no good. > > The "command center" GUI app is pretty, but it is nowhere as good as onmonitor. > I thought Informix committed to us that they would not get rid of the character > based tools that we screamed so loudly about. > > Informix folks.....is this an oversight or does it mean that you really are > abandoning our character-based tools? > > Joe > -- > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Joe Lumbley(jlumbley@netcom.com) author of: "INFORMIX DBA Survival Guide" > > Slaving away on "INFORMIX DEBUGGERS Survival Guide", available early 1998 > from Prentice Hall/Informix Press. If you have debugging tips, tools, or > ideas to share, please send me some e-mail. > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I agree with your assertions Joe, and the other good people who've been commenting here. It's surprising at how much is missing with the ROM, even the 2.1 version. I'm hopeful that Informix will be adding more to it. If there ever was a great program that could be used to showcase New Era, onmonitor could be the one. Onmonitor was/is a 4GL app, let's see the great New Era migration in action. Or use DDJ. Or give me or someone the source code, and let's migrate it to a graphical interface, maybe even Delphi. As far as the ROM thang, :-) I eagerly await more features for it, namely a permissions interface, and a more in-depth status reporting for sessions. It would be great to see simply who is connecting to data bases and other session-specific information, such as a version of "onstat -g ses" or "onstat -g sql". These could easily be displayed in the session list. This would avoid having to use both interfaces. onstat really could be turned into a graphical app with a little creativity. It has too many options the way it is and really could be split up into several utilities. Another thing that would really be great is to not only show dbspaces in the Space Explorer, but to show/list databases in each dbspace. The expectation is to drill-down with this interface, but it ends abrubtly showing only size of the data base space. You then have to go to the command-line, back and forth, rather time consuming. And without a Korn shell NT's command line environment sucks. Several vendors also add metrics to the Performance Monitor on NT, such as when you add SQLServer, or Netscape Enterprise Server. If onperf/dbcockpit are not available for NT, at least supply the add-in for Performance Monitor. It would be nice to monitor transactions per second and some of the other metrics found in SQLServer. Beyond any problems with Informix on NT, my biggest concern for Informix is that they've bet the farm on NT. Interestingly, the NT market is developer driven, and developers I've worked with are not impressed with data base speed on NT, whether for Informix or SQLServer, or whoever. Developers that are creating the newer client/server apps are expecting performance of at least UNIX, and coming up short. It makes the data base engine look bad, and I fear will hurt Informix more in the long run, than if they'd really stick with UNIX. Now we're seeing Informix compete with SQLServer on NT, imcompletely, or Oracle, incompletely... There's also Linux, but that's another story... :-) -- Tim Schaefer \\\\|// tschaefe@mindspring.com 6 6 -------------------------oOOo---( )---o00o---------------------- http://www.inxutil.com - My Ezine http://www.informix.com - Informix Software Inc. http://www.iiug.org - International Informix User Group/FAQ news://comp.databases.informix - Newsgroup for Informix Users ================================================================