IBM Banner Ad for Informix

[rolandsmokit]

Imagine my surprise when I logged onto Daniweb and saw a scrolling advert for IBMs Informix database.

I've been using Informix for years and it is an incredibly elegant bit of code, and the object extensions you can use are totally unique.

I'd always thought of Informix as a secret cult that those of us " in the know" used as a secret weapon to do databasey things the other developers cant :-) , looks like IBM are advertising it now so my competitive advantage is not going to last long :-(

Anyone else out there experienced Informix ? Wanna start a thread here on Daniweb about the tricks of the trade ? Maybe introduce some of the younger developers to our cult ?

[goatbadger]

I've been using Informix for years too and think it's really great IBM are advertising it again. It would brilliant to see more active discussions here. The product is going from strength to strength - there's some great new features V11.70, hopefully this is the start of the Informix revolution!

[douglawry]

Totally agree. No other database product has features like Time Series, which is now part of the standard product. Since the recent pricing revamp, it's also massively cheaper and some editions are free. There is no longer any excuse for using expensive slow bloatware like Oracle!

[ifpzr]

It's always been brilliantly easy to install, configure and maintain, as well as the fastest and most reliable database you can get, and now IBM are piling in more and more functionality all the time - Mach 11, Flexible Grid, Storage Provisioning and so on. Can't understand why anyone would use anything but Informix!

[AdeelM]

At my place of work, we strictly use Oracle. I've been a software developer for 5 years now after graduating with my B.S. and have wrote countless applications that interface with an Oracle 9i and 10g database. I'm wondering what the difference between IBM's Informix and Oracle 10g are? What would be the advantage of using Informix over Oracle be?

[douglawry]

You can get Informix to perform better on less hardware. For example, each database session starts a separate operating system process in Oracle, whereas this is handled by a resident multi-threaded process pool in Informix. The list is long: give me some hints what you would like to do.

[rolandsmokit]

Interesting point on the hardware, I was reading the other day that the electricity costs of running a server for 3 years are greater than the purchase price of the tin ! The lighter the box the better all round, and brownie points from the greens !

[ifpzr]

And because of the multi-threaded approach, Informix is *very* scalable - doesn't matter how much hardware you throw at it, it'll make good use of it.

[begooden]

Hi Roland,

I work with Informix databases since 1986. I have been employed by Informix Software during 11 years, and stupidly left for another company, but came back to this technology 8years after, and sincerely I do not regreat at all. Informix Dynamic server has definately the best architecture design among all databases, and IBM is now seriously committed in promoting this product. The multi threaded architecture has started in 1993, and the ORDBMS techno was included in 1998. These are now many years on the many with a very scalable architecture + real multimedia (and other) data. It is also extremely robust ( it is not rare to see 3 or 4 years uptime at big customers).

Add to this the Informix Warehouse Accelerator, which provides you up to 100 times performance improvement in datawarehouse queries on a linux platform, you definately have a major contributor in the datawarehouse playground.

[\007]

This thread should be removed.

[happygeek]

Why's that then?

[\007]

A number of low post users doing nothing but 'praising' this product. The whole thread is essentially spam/advertising. As if the informix ad wasn't bad enough.