Informix Bashing

Path: emory!ogicse!uwm.edu!wupost!udel!brahms.udel.edu!god From: god@brahms.udel.edu (Scott C Gray) Newsgroups: comp.databases.informix Message-ID: <25152@brahms.udel.edu> Date: 18 Oct 91 01:35:30 GMT Organization: University of Delaware Posted: Thu Oct 17 18:35:30 1991 This posting is intended mainly to complain about informix, but it also brings up problems that I have, if anyone wants to offer solutions/condolences it would be cool. First: Will informix ever come out with a *reall* C interface to their database? I find that I spend most of my time working around their code rather than working with it. For example: I am writing a program that needs to grant privileges to people throughout several databases (among many other things). To speed things up, I like to declare all of my cursors (about 25 or 30 of them) when the program is first run so that I can speed things up. BUT, when it comes time to switch databases during granting, I loose all of my cursors. Also, it is a real pain to make two seperate .h files, one for the esql modules and one for the C modules. Yes, I know that I can compile the C modules with esql but I need to compile the non-sql modules with other databases. Is informix ever going to supply a real programatic interface? If anyone has ever worked with SYBASE, they will know what I am talking about...screw this embeded stuff. Second: Informix tends to be very unreliable (at least for us). At least once every week and a half, we have then phone into our systems and repair problems (costing us thousands of dollars). I admit, we do push our system harder than most...we have a single database spaning 1.2G of disk with over 150 tables and about 250 people banging on it, but still the down time is verging on unacceptable. Third: They're online support, once you manage to reach it, isn't worth squat. I had a problem a while back with an extraodinarily slow delete from systabauth (it was taking on the order of 25 minutes to delete 20 rows). The delete statement was: DELETE FROM systabauth WHERE grantee = ?. They're suggestion was: "Use a MATCHES instead of an =, MATCHES is meant for strings and = is for numbers." Now come on. Admittedly, the problem was my own (there was a delay caused by my program) but the advise they had to offer wouldn't have helped one way or the other. I do actually have a couple of nice things to say. I like their isql, it is actually a pretty useful and coherent package and doesn't crash very often. I have been trying to use SYBASE's DataWorkbench (the isql equiv) and don't find it nearly as useful. They also supply a nice set of tools for monitoring the databases. So, I think that if Informix could ever come up with a real programatic interface, and strengthen up the software integrity, I think they would have a really mean system on they're hands..but at the moment I find that I am dealing with it rather than working with it. Just had to get that off my chest. Later Scott