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IBM To Purchase Informix Database
Boban Acimovic writes "According to this story on the Yahoo Financial News", IBM is going to buy Informix Database Software for $1 billion in cash. The main players in database leader struggle will be Oracle and IBM after this acquisition." That's in the commericial space - obviously SleepyCat, PostGres and MySQL and others aren't going away. And it appears that the other parts of Informix will be staying around as a seperate biz, so we should continue to see their support for OSS [?] .
They're paying that much money in cash? why would they do such a foolish thing?
Who the fuck said MySQL was the open source community's flagship database?
Honestly -- we have PostgreSQL (which at version 7.1 is actually a passable database for smaller implimentations), InterBase, and many others. The state of a single product says nothing about the OSS community as a whole, and it's quite improper to suggest otherwise.
That said, I utterly agree that Oracle and DB2 beat the cr*p out of their OSS competition -- but that doesn't stop me from using PostgreSQL when my needs are modest and my budget slim.
What features does Postgres have that Interbase lacks? Just curious.
nice non sequitur.
What he's saying is that very often people performing benchmarks against oracle are likely not to be Professional Oracle DBAs.
Most real world Oracle shops have professional DBA's running their systems (this is one area where I'm glad to say I *have* seen companies spare little expense at hiring the best & brightest; their data is their lifeblood).
-Stu
www.inetsoftware.de and www.bea.com both have SQL server JDBC drivers.
Though I will grant it still is a niche product, but that's one helluva niche.
-Stu
User definable functions including aggregate functions. You want to define a MAX or MIN on text fields go crazy!.
Oracle has this. And a bunch of predefined ones for text fields (included in intermedia, the thing you said "I have no idea what this is" to)
Loadable stored procedure languages. You can use perl, python, C or the built in language. You can write code in C and run it privledged mode with access to the OS (as the postgres user).
Oracle allows C and Java for the same thing.
Ability to define your own operators. It also has a very rich set of operators like a operator that says "is this point outside of this circle". In fact the geometric datatypes are freaking awsome.
Oracle has this (Java or C). Oracle Spatial also has many built in operators and functions for geometry.
Ability to define your own objects (kinda) and store them in the database. Very object relational.
...Oracle has been object/relational since 1997.
unlimited row size. Unlimited length text fields.
Oracle CLOBs are unlimited size. Can't confirm column limits.
Regular expressions in the SQL statements.
Groovy. Don't think Oracle does this yet.
I could go on and on but trust me there are problems postgres can solve that oracle can't.
Please do go on... you've dug yourself into quite a hole so far.
-Stu
For one, cache coherency on read/write conflicts between parallel cluster nodes. In 9i this will be increased to write/write conflicts as well.
other things that Oracle has that PostgreSQL may need to catchup on:
- Materialized views & snapshots
- Tons of documentation (look at the book store)
- Tablespaces and rollback segments for fine grained disk usage distribution
- 24/7 operation: the ability to take portions of the database offline for backup / recovery while keeping other parts up (i.e. tablespaces)
- Tools support (SQL Navigator, DBArtisan, etc.)
- Heterogeneous data replication
- Text-based indices (intermedia)
- XSQL and XML rowsets
And 9i is going to add even more features for 24/7 operations, such as re-creating indices without table locks, moving tables across namespaces with only short duration locks, etc.
So, while I really do like PostgreSQL, it isn't Oracle.
-Stu
MySQL does not have many of the features of an Oracle or DB2. There are no provisions for refferental integrety. I don't think there is a good way to back up very large databases. (Say more than a few hundred megs) and so on. That does not make it bad. Just not in the same ballgame as the big databases.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
IBM is no more worried about MySQL cutting into its DB2 market than Boeing is worried about Cessna cutting into its airline market.
Its not that DB2 is "Better" than Mysql any more than a 747 is "Better" than a Cessna 172, they just do different things and get used for different jobs.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I would certainly agree that Oracle on Solaris is more scalable, bulletproof, karma-riffic, etc. than MS SQL server, but you only need an aircraft carrier when you are fighter planes at sea. If you are just going fishing, a rowboat is a much more useful craft.
While it certainly is true that Microsoft has hyped their database as being capable of things it really isn't capable of, for most projects it is perfectly adequate. Of course, in that same vein PostgreSQL would probably work as well, and it is a heck of a lot cheaper than either Oracle or SQL Server
and you can eat it too:
-j
--
http://kx.com
taylor:{+/y**\1.0,x%1+!-1+#y}
TPC is hardly the best indicator of performance or scalability. It doesn't really allow meaningful comparisons between systems.
Sad - responding to my own message.
I did, of course, mean TPC-C. Other TPC benchmarks are more meaningful, and less tweakable by the vendor.
More to the point, it's playing in a completely different market to all of the others. It isn't, and probably never will be considered a replacement for Oracle, because it's not SQL based. It is, however, a fully fledged database, supporting transactions, fine grained locking, online backups etc. Also, anyone that thinks MySQL or PostgreSQL are players in the database leader struggle is dreaming. Sure, they're fine databases in their own right, and in time, they well gain some of the features that they're missing. They're fine for small to medium businesses, but for enterprise use (which is where Oracle and DB2 reign supreme), they're just not even close.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Current versions of BerkeleyDB support transactions, and note that MySQL's transaction support is built using BerkeleyDB, so clearly MySQL isn't going to support transactions and be any faster.
I thought Oracle 9i was an Apache-based application server, not a database.
--
Breakfast served all day!
IBM wanted Red Brick and the only way to get it was to buy the rest of the Informix database business.
Red Brick
Linux if not open source is very much a part of IBM. If you spend any time at any IBM campus that deals with software or cruise through any of their internal web sites, you'll quickly understand this fact. Perhaps more telling is that IBM is spending real dollars to contribute to the Linux community.
Also, a recent post stated that the enterprise db's are in a different space than the available open source offerings. This is very true. For my part, I'm looking forward to better support for an improved database offering from IBM that runs on Linux.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Hm. I do think Sybase and Microsoft are also players in the mid-to-large database market, and that a lot of companies with decent products but small market share, like Progress, would also take issue with the idea of IBM and Oracle being "it".
Sleepycat? Yeah, , Oracle and IBM do have little embedded data store products, but I'd hardly mention them in the same breath as FIlemaker, much less Oracle and DB/2. And as for MySQL and Postgres? Please. They're competition for Filemaker, MS Access, Interbase, Cloudbase and the like, and in some cases very good competition for them. But not even Postgres 7.x touches the lowest end of what the IBM, Oracle and Informix server products do. With live replication and decent hot backup features, maybe it could chew on their ankles, but that's about it. As for the middle-range, wake me up when Postgres can do clustering and failover, or when a single Postgres database can hit at least half a terabyte with good performance.
You really hit the nail on the head. Wintel just can't make it to the big time. I have to ask why anybody or company can think that a consumer OS, which has all the bolted on crap Microsoft forces into its Windows OS's, should be capable of high-end computing on the scale of the large *nix's? It's rediculous to think it'll ever make it there. The fact that Microsoft NEVER ventures off it's OS means they will never make it to that big $$ market. As long as they only play in THEIR sandbox ( Windows/x86 ) their stuck. For an example, last year they released a micro-dbase for handhelds. Guess what, it only ran on WinCE! PalmOS has 80%-90% of the market and they don't support it. ;) Had to throw that in there for fun. :)
Why did this thread even come up? A PC Database running the same Databases run on HP-UX, AIX, OS/390, Solaris? Not likely. And they expect this to come from a company that took 10 years to make a 32bit multi-threaded OS that crashes as few times as IBM's OS/2 v2.1 ( but requires 4x the hardware )?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I believe the overhead of transactionally-aware auto-increment fields would be far to greater that they are worth. Sequences are very simple to partition to prevent primary key collisions and don't have the burden of transactional awareness. This is especially useful in asychronously replicated environments as it allows for fault-tolerance on the connection between the DB's.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
MS dropped support for Alpha in Win2K. There will be no more official releases for the platform.
Anyone who does disk space management with mission critical data using a symlink should be strung up by the short and curlies and summarily shot.
You simply don't do that sort of thing with mission critical data.
Of course, with mission critical data, you are using an enterprise class database so you don't have to, and that's the point. Postgres, MySQL and others are excellent products in the space they operate within. That space is not mission critical, enterprise level database servers. That is why lumping them in with a story about enterprise level servers is bad reporting. There are people out there who think that it is perfectly ok to keep a company's financials on Postgres, because they just don't know anybetter. What's sad, is that when the shit hits the fan and the stock holders come looking for the executive who has personal liability for that decission, the sysadmin who made the call isn't going to be the one who ends up bankrupt and in debt 5 mil to the corporation.
It is really dissappointing to see PostgreSQL, MySQL and SleepyCat compared to Oracle, Informix, Sybase, and DB2. The latter are enterprise databases, the former are not. While PostgreSQL adn the others are very good in the space they operate in, they do not do what Oracle and company do. To compare them as if they operated in the same space shows a gross ignorance of enterprise level data computing that is inexcusable for a site that is suppossed to be about "news for nerds." "Nerds" should know that enterprise level databases are more than transactional SQL engines (hell, in the case of MySQL and Sleepycat, not even that!).
Where did you hear that?
NASA uses Oracle, MS SQL, Access, DB2 and a bunch of other databases. NASA is not a monolithic organization that dictates what software can be used. Each project makes its own decisions as to what software is the best fit for its needs. It could be Linux with MySQL, NT with MS SQL or Solaris with Oracle. If you name a software package, there is probably a NASA project that uses it.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Interbase (Firebird on sourceforge) has a nice niche in the open source database arena as well.
I would put it somewhere in between mysql and posgres in terms of ease of use, ease of installation, performance, features, and third party tool support.
For some of us it's a good compromise.
Considering how difficult it is to pry corporate customers from an entrenched platform, I'd say "leading in sales" is pretty significant.
Technical merit doesn't always lead to success.
if you've really been following the RDBMS market for about 10 years, informix has really been in a very precarious position for the last 7 of them, or so. they've done rather poorly financially, and the (ISV) software development community has only barely continued to support them from what i've seen.
there's absolutely no surprise in any of this to me...
ibm is buying *INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY*, first and foremost.
searching patent databases shows us that since 1996 somewhere around 17 very useful (and non-frivilous) patents have been granted to informix. i'm fairly certain that a number of these methods are directly used by oracle in their engine (say the one that discusses the method of building a two-phase commit engine into the RDBMS itself).
in short, ibm (beelzebub) has now a new lever to exert force onto larry (satan himself)...
cheers.
Peter
i had a posting somewhere above, but i believe this is a purchase for INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS. there are a number of key patents that informix has been granted (it looks like searching the patent database that about 17 fairly good patents have been granted since 1996 to them). one of these is, for example, describes the method by which you could implementing a two-phase-commit transaction processing monitor inside the kernel of the RDBMS itself (which oracle has also done, for instance).
i think this was a leverage purchase, no more no less, but what do i know.
cheers.
Peter
i don't agree with your statement that foreign keys are really only applicable to schema that is expected to see NO deletions performed against it.
:)
i can envision many cases where i want to ensure that a parent table's row exists before i go decorating that parent with additional rows in a child table (say in a star schema).
i have actually built a few simple applications that did add additional attributes to some base object by decorating it inside a child table in this manner. most were normalized to third-normal and backed off from just a bit.
this just makes relatively good sense if you expect people to be using the schema OUTSIDE some very well controlled and implemented abstraction layer. if the abstraction layer (say some object-relational mapping) is the only inserter/updater of the tables, and you just use the relational engine to do REPORTING efficiently, then heck, no foreign keys necessary at all
so, foreign keys are still pretty useful for even insert-then-select schema objects, but it depends upon the situation, as usual...
just my 0.02.
Peter
damn!
ran out of mod points.
you're not kidding, though.
this might be the best post i've seen in a while.
makes you wonder what the last two dozen years of research into transaction processing & relational database management were wasted on?
cheers.
Peter
i'll add to this.
as was mentioned numerous other places in the replies to this story:
the tpc-c benchmark results can be easily "enhanced" by partitioning data into multiple individual instances (unfortunately the benchmark allows this).
so, most people looking for a suitable one-box or two-machine-cluster solution are going to be confused by all these partitioned results to say the least.
if we pay attention to the non-clustered results, the IBM 680 sits at the top, while the bull, hp, & fujitsu, sun, & other offerings follow closely behind.
the important thing to note is that if you needed to buy a single box (or a pair to form a cluster or an OPS cluster if oracle) you would be making a very different decision than buying a partitioned cluster of IBM xSeries 370's. this, in fact, is the decision almost everyone looking at these types of performance numbers has to make "in the real world".
few have the luxury to partition their data into multiple instances... they usually are stuck with inescapable growing-pains from the past.
cheers.
Peter
my opinion, and only that:
i searched through the patent search engines, and came across a fairly healthy intellectual property portfolio. some of those patents are describing methods that i'm almost positive are used inside oracle, for example.
this could be a tool in order to gain leverage on the competition merely from this one perspective...
time will tell...
Peter
Of course, it's a turn-on if you don't want to wait around for SQL parsing. To each his own, I suppose.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Doesn't one of these seem a little out of place?
Mark: "We're going to need SPEED! Let's use MySQL."
Bob: "This is going to be a high transaction session database! We're going to need transactions and rollbacks! Let's use PostgreSQL."
Dennis: "We'd a crummy little dot-bomb. We don't need speed, and we don't need transactions and rollbacks. Let's use DBM files."
-James
A guy walks into an automotive store and asks "Would you give me a rear view mirror for a yugo?" The clerk thinks about it for a minute and says "Okay, that's fair."
It can't be the software, which was crap. In 200 lines of code, I wrote two different test cases, (only one of which was multithreaded), which crashed the Informix server.
It can't be the support organization. Getting help from Informix support was a surreal experience. There was the time I had to instruct one of their support guys how to unzip a zip file. I had to explain to another one the concept of a client, and introduce the fact that Informix was accessed from one.
It can't be the advanced R&D: The aforementioned Illustra was surpassed in all ways by IBMs research out of their Santa Teresa Labs, and some of this research has already found its way into DB/2.
Customer base? I didn't think Informix had that much of a following.
So what is it? What? I just don't get it.
You're missing my point. Up until that point, I had never done any sort of programming beyond shell scripting. If you're a PICK programmer then more power to you but making personal attacks is a bit low. I'm sure if I were to revisit it today, I could handle it just fine. But you were correct in saying that I didn't work with it long enough to figure it out.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
God man. I had to deal with Universe/Unidata at one of my jobs. We ran it on HPUX. What a pain in the ass it was. At the time I wasn't OVERLY database savey but it seemed to be a workhorse. Not very friendly, that's all.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I got my pile to work.
cpeterso
but in MySQL you can emulate most, if not all, of those features in your Perl code.. and with far less code than the dangerous C code Oracle includes in their database kernel. For example, the MySQL documentation specifically says:
MySQL, in almost all cases, allows you to solve for potential problems by including simple checks before updates and by running simple scripts that check the databases for inconsistencies and automatically repair or warn if such occurs. Note that just by using the MySQL log or even adding one extra log, one can normally fix tables perfectly with no data integrity loss.
Not even transactions can prevent all loss if the server goes down. In such cases even a transactional system can lose data. The difference between different systems lies in just how small the time-lap is where they could lose data. No system is 100% secure, only ``secure enough.'' Even Oracle, reputed to be the safest of transactional databases, is reported to sometimes lose data in such situations.
Smart companies save money by deploying MySQL instead of Oracle. They can invest that money in smart Linux developers and the NASDAQ. With a powerful return for their money, the developers can run simple scripts to detect database inconsistencies as soon as possible. The developers can immediately load the backup tapes, losing some potential sales but maintaining perfect data integrity. Neither Oracle nor SQL Server allow you to run these simple scripts to automatically repair database inconsistencies. Is your data truly safe in a "black box" like Oracle or SQL Server?
cpeterso
But on the other hand, IBM deserves any and all relational database glory for employing E. F. Codd, who wrote the innocently titled paper "A relational model of data for large shared databanks" in 1971, which started the whole field. Given IBM's previous monopolistic tendencies, it's sweetly ironic that they end up spending a billion dollars to gobble up *any* other RDBMS provider when they used to *own* the field, lock, stock and barrel, starting with their own System R. Indeed, IBM Japan used to brag about it:
ALL YOUR DATABASE 'R' BELONG TO US!!
(Sorry...it just had to be said. :-)) Meanwhile,
with their purchase of Informix, IBM has probably
stomped out the last possibility that any form of QUEL would ever make any comeback, given that Informix had bought Illustra which had commercialized Postgres, which originally spoke Postquel, the follow-on to QUEL after Ingres had
gone commercial. That is, unless the developers in the PostgreSQL project miraculously resurrect
it themselves...
Babar
Of course, one of the great stengths of Pick is *being able* to program in Data Basic. Being able to use Basic or C or java or perl or ... would be a real strength. Pick Basic is a great language for the batch processing, reporting, and green screen user sessions it has traditionally been used for. As a former Universe and Unidata programmer, I'd love to see IBM do something cool with these databases. If nothing else, VARs can start telling people that their product runs on one of IBMs databases, thereby avoiding any discussion of obscure proprietary database issues.
Terry Layne
Portland, OR
So do this:
IF (Y.Q1.AMT + 0) # 0 THEN...
Ugly yes, but more idiomatic.
Terry Layne
Portland, OR
DB/2 is very expensive, on par if not more pricy then Oracle. I think they are trying to have mid-priced DB. You get the great IBM support and some of the power (probably with an easy migration path to DB/2) for a much lower price. It should give IBM an advantage over Oracle which, as far as I know has no entry-level priced database.
Rick
In an enterprise environment all of your options are costly, if you abide by the licenses. I certainly do not count NT as an enterprise environment. That is what we are talking about enterprise level DB's. On an enterprise level DB/2 and Oracle are very expensive. In a startup if you could pay $5,000 for you informix licenses and when you need it move up to a more expensive DB/2 product that would be of great benefit. In most large enterprises Mysql and Postgres would not be suitable.
It all depends on your angle. Obviously people are biased based on marketing and ideas rather then actuall technical specs and merrits if they feel its "supposed to work out of the box".
Thats kind of like saying because you have a 2.2 litter honda it is supposed to be as fast as a 2.2. litter porsche. Like anything else the porsche is proffessionally tuned, installed, designed and maintained much like the porsche of databases is proffessionally tuned, installed and maintained.
I've seen several people ask "What makes an enterprise DB?" Well, size and speed mostly.
For data look at:
http://www.dbpd.com/vault/9808win.html
It's old, but I haven't seen anything newer. Take into consideration that these are business DBs. No monster image blobs (ala TerraServer) to bump up the size.
The largest database in the survey racks in at around 11T (DB2 Hitachi mainframe)
UPS has a DB with 324,000,000,000 rows/records.
Roadway Express has system supporting 1820 Transactions per second (TPS).
JCPenny has a decission support DB that manages 784 concurrent queries.
None of the DBs run on PC hardware, and the UNIX DBs are about 1/2 the size of the mainframes.
Microsoft and other small/mid-range databases are the most threatend by MySQL et.al. The size and scopes of the problems addressed by MS SQLServer are the same that can be solved with the OpenSource varieties.
It will be a while before the big boys will be challanged.
gwonk
Here's another link. These are the guys who run the survey. The latest report is not available online that I can find.
Winter Corp
As has been pointed out by others Postgres, MySQL and Berkley DB aren't players in the same area as DB2 and Oracle.
However, there are a couple of other surprising omissions. Sybase ASE 12 is a pretty nice database, and is very competitive feature and platform wise with Oracle and DB2, and probably has a bigger market share than Informix. MS SQL Server 7/2000 is also a very nice database to work with. It's use is growing quickly for good reason - it's fast (on comparable hardware), cheap and the SQL Server development tools kick Oracle's Ass. Ever used MS Query analyzer? It is beautiful.. and comes free with SQL Server licences. You can get third part equivalents for Oracle (eg, from Quest), and they are also nice, but they cost around $10,000 for a site licence.
No, it doesn't run on non-Windows platforms, and yes Oracle on high end Sun hardware will run quicker. However, there are probably less than 5000 companies in the world that need that much power - and MS is going after that, too with MS Windows Data Center.
I'm not a MS weenie - I like an Oracle DB as much as anyone. However, it isn't as far ahead of SQL Server as some of you seem to think - and some of the bugs in it are just as bad as anything you'll see in SQL Server.
> Nothing on PICK or any of it's various flavors in the article.
PICK is not a relational database, no matter what the marketroids try to label it. No joins, no referential integrity, no client/server. I can write reports in SQL in a couple hours, which took a week to write in PICK.
This for some reason brought up a scene where Dr Evil (or was that Aevil) would be one of these OSS developers, and these IBM would be the US.
Evil: Well IBM, you better pay us for our DB before we crush you.
IBM: Hahahhaa.. we have DB2
Evil: (demonstrates Informix) As you see IBM, we do have a powerful DB. Pay us $1 BILLION DOLLARS, or we'll have to release the new version that outperforms db2 by 50%.
IBM: You fiend!
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
On dual CPU PIII 800 running Linux it would cost about $19,000 USD for Oracle workgroup edition. For DB2 it would cost about 2500 per CPU , total of about $5,000 USD. I found Informix to be more expensive (you have to buy the enterprise edition to get things such as java stored procedures, etc) which was almost 25,000 per CPU.
I would say that right now DB2 is the best buy for the money, even over Microsoft SQL Server in terms of performance and price.
(Our company is moving to DB2 from MySQL as we speak... )
--------------------
Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
A biggie is storage management. Enterprise-class databases layer table storage on top of logical storage, which is then mapped into units of physical storage, which allows your database to span, for example, multiple physical drives, or to put the indices on different spindles from the tables.
Was. From what I've heard, at this point they've removed virtually all of the Sybase code. MS SQLServer 6.5 was almost all Sybase code, 7.0 and 2000 are virtually NO sybase code.
In the history of the world has there ever been a case when stockholders came looking for executives who have personal liability? Of course not. When PSIX (PSI-NET) stock went from $60.00 to nothing what happened to the executives? NOTHING!
The xecutives cached their stock options at $60 and have that money tucked away in some bank or another.
Personal responsibility and personal liability have no place in the corporate world. That's why corporations were invented in the first place to shirk personal responsiblity.
As for everyting else you say it's pure garbage.
Postgres can keep your financials just as well as oracle, mysql, SAP-DB, interbase or whatever. It's fiscally irresponsible to pay for enterprise features if you are not running an enterprise. For the vast majority of the businesses in the world who have less then a couple of hundred employees any open source database if plenty good enough. Lots and lots of businesses worldwide ran interbase and SAPDB for years before they became open source. The idea is to choose the right tool and to manage it properly. I would reccomend a easy to understand and use tool like interbase any day over a complex monster like oracle if the business does not need enterprise features like 32 processors or gigabytes of data.
War is necrophilia.
Materialized views & snapshots
Rule subsystem. Very powerful in fact arguably more powerful then oracles implementation of views.
- Tons of documentation (look at the book store)
All you need is on the web including the source code.
- Tablespaces and rollback segments for fine grained disk usage distribution
OK
- 24/7 operation: the ability to take portions of the database offline for backup / recovery while keeping other parts up (i.e. tablespaces)
You can do live backups but not live restores. You can however stream a backup from one server to another. Pretty cool.
- Tools support (SQL Navigator, DBArtisan, etc.)
There are plenty of tools as well as ODBC drivers so you can interface it with just about anything. psql is pertty great too one of the best command line tools I have used.
- Heterogeneous data replication
no live replication but it does supports oids and you can roll your own relatively easily if your needs are not too complex. See my comment of streaming backups.
- Text-based indices (intermedia)
I have no idea what this is or why it might be useful.
- XSQL and XML rowsets
Not needed because really it does not belong in a database. Any dork can write a few lines of perl to get the data and turn it into XML.
OK here are some features of postgres that oracle does not.
User definable functions including aggregate functions. You want to define a MAX or MIN on text fields go crazy!.
Loadable stored procedure languages. You can use perl, python, C or the built in language. You can write code in C and run it privledged mode with access to the OS (as the postgres user).
Ability to define your own operators. It also has a very rich set of operators like a operator that says "is this point outside of this circle". In fact the geometric datatypes are freaking awsome.
Ability to define your own objects (kinda) and store them in the database. Very object relational.
unlimited row size. Unlimited length text fields.
Regular expressions in the SQL statements.
I could go on and on but trust me there are problems postgres can solve that oracle can't.
War is necrophilia.
I have ran sql server 7.0 before and it's really not a 24X7 system. It frequently needs to be shut down to clear some odd locks. Mostly if the client software crashes in the middle of doing something it's impossible to clear the transaction or the locks without killing the server (I forget which types but about 5 types of locks could not be killed with kill command). Also someimes you had to kick people off to reorganize some tables basically clustering on different indexes. It kept getting confused and gave odd errors which had nothing to do with the problem.
Anyway it was no fun to manage and kicking people off the database always get the management in a huff. I guess it reminded them that they made a huge mistake when they bought the damned thing.
War is necrophilia.
MSSQL Server was Sybase back in the 4.2 incarnation. Since then the product has been totally rewritten (in fact I think there was a little celebration at MS a while back when the last line of Sybase code was removed).
MSSQL is hardly a 'desktop' system either - check out some of the TPC scores it has been getting lately. They've really done a lot of good work in the storage engine recently. I don't believe the Intel hardware will scale to the same level as Sun and other hardware will under Oracle, but from my experience in the database space up to 10G to 100G and less than a few thousand users, MSSQL runs very well.
Oh, I should also mention that MSSQL is a *lot* more developer friendly than Oracle. It really is a nice product and those who haven't used it should have a look before the knee-jerk MS == evil/slow/whatever kicks in.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
I'm not sure what you are basing the comment that the "outlining architecture is pretty much the same".
Basically, the storage engine is different (no more devices, just files that can autogrow), the query parser and optimiser is new, the stored proc engine is different, indexes were completely uprooted and changed (look at the escalation and row level locking policy changes between 6.5 and 7.0), the interface between the SQL engine and the storage engine was published and made modular...
Actually, I find it hard to think of anything that DIDN'T change going from 6.5 to 7.0. Even most (serious) T-SQL scripts had to change!!
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Although MySQL is nice - if one really wants a free database today he ought to check Interbase. It's free - but has much more important functionnalities that MySQL totally lack (consistency, triggers, etc...).
Beside, Sleepycat DB isn't really competing with Oracle, DB2, Informix or even MySQL. It doesn't have any SQL query language, so one needs to use the proprietary API to access it, which is a turn off for many programmers (me included).
Because those vendors you mention have been and will be around for a while. They are true, tried, and tested (well, maybe not Microsoft on the tested part
People know those vendors and they trust them, right or not.
Do you think Miscrosft, Intel, and say Dell are going away in the near future? My money says most of the Linux companies will be gone long before they are... but I'm just a troll.
Do you read the messages around here?
hm...
Turns out to be really easy to augment the existing cmd.exe shell with this stuff (either add the files to SYSTEM_ROOT/system32 or add a fsf/bin directory to your path...). And just yesterday I found an application that creates multiple virtual desktops (yay!).
Now if I could just scroll-shade my windows I'd have a system almost as functional as, say, BeOS. (OSX needs that too, for that matter. OS whore? Me? Nah... :) NT will never be as pretty as Be, but perhaps it can be nearly as usable. ;)
Windows may be a pain in the ass, but if you have to use it all day then you might as well try to get the most out of it....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
<naive> Microsoft & SQL Server? </naive>
I don't really keep up with such things (though I probably should), but does this really mean that "no one" is running SQL Server? I thought it was doing well enough that some naive people -- marketing drones, purchase mismanagers, etc -- see the term "SQL" as being synonymous with the M$ product instead of, oh, say, 'structured query language'.
I'm not even trying to start a flamewar here (though Slashdot is oh so good at that), but I didn't think M$ was a player to be dismissed in this area. Am I wrong?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
IBM uses Notes enterprise wide, of course, as does 3M (I've been employed by both). When I left 3M, they were doing some interesting things in Notes like document translation on the fly - and this was in 1997. My sources tell me Accenture is also transitioning to Notes (but don't quote me on that).
Notes has good points and bad. As an email client or PDA software, its not gonna compete. Mostly, I think because it forces a database approach on these decidedly not database type tasks. But I think you'll be hard pressed to find an enterprise wide document revision/archiving system with the same support for Knowledge Management as Lotus.
How long have you been saving that joke for? Why didn't you wait longer?!? :)
It's not just Oracle and IBM in the commercial DB world... Sybase is still a player... at least, I still see lots of job postings for Sybase programmers/DBA's, so it must be doing okay...
--
"A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye." -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
We're using their InterCall product (a C library that provides full access to UniVerse via RPC) wrapped in a Perl module to do our web interface.
Additionally, there is the UniVerse General Call Interface, which allows calls from Pick Basic to C/C++ programs.
Have you ever seen an organization try to build a serious organization on SQL Server?
I'd like to quote Beavis & Butthead...
"FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE!!!"
I've finally found the off by one erro
And it appears that the other parts of Informix will be staying around as a seperate biz, so we should continue to see their support for OSS.
Informix Corporation owns Informix Software and Ascential Software. The software assets of Informix Software are being sold to IBM for cash, not shares. The Informix Corporation will be renamed Ascential Software, and will take up where its former second subsidiary left off. Informix Software will disappear into a legal entity on a shelf.
Ascential, formerly known as Ardent, has no history of involvement in Free or Open Source software: they're best known for their Extract-Transform-and-Load tool "DataStage". They also sell a few other software tools. But there will be no OSS support from Ascential. If any GPLing or open-sourcing is to happen with the database products, it will have to come from IBM, and I'm sorry to say that today's announcement tells us nothing new about that.
Thats the question that I have. This makes no sense. DB/2 has the same distribution that Informix has, are they going to support both? I suppose that DB/2 is more of a mainframe application than Informix is, but I could be fudding that.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Previous to this, Informix wasn't exactly what you'd call "cheap". I worked for an all-Informix shop at one point, and they paid through the nose for a then-obsolete Informix 5. Mind you, they had multi-terabyte databases and millions of transactions a day, but still....
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That just comes out to $10,000/customer. If every customer had an annual support program with Informix, and bought additional software licenses from IBM née Informix every year, then the purchase isn't exactly a silly investment, from this point alone.
--
MasterCard International, for one. And yes, MS Outhouse is still better than Lotus Nots.
--
I for ONE IBM employee do like notes, I think it is a littly klunky for doing email but For other things regarding information sharing and things of that nature I like it very much. Notes also has some features for coding within it that are nice as well especially for gathering information. I do like some of the other options and I only work I notes now. On of the other problems is it tends to chew memory like crazy. One of the other nice things about Notes is that I get to personally laugh at all the viruses affecting Microsoft products when they go around. As far as having to log out it is due to Deamon's still running from Notes. I have been to many company sites that are running notes, and seem to be very happy with it in the way they can link their email systems to their information managment systems.
An armed society is a polite Society
Until Oracle allows publication of benchmark results just as does Postgresql one can claim that Oracle is leading in sales, but not much else.
Seastead this.
In answer to your question, my experience has been that the businesses I've contracted with run towards vendors that offer the best bang for the buck. Wintel hardware is cheap, so is MSC contract lacky help. (Of which I'm not, BTW...)
I'm not saying it's right, just that this is the way it is... Platform implementation decisions are usually made by the boys who approve the budget in corporations.
Thank you! Finally, someone who knowns what they are talking about!
(btw - 7.1 has text-based indices, finer grained disk usage can be done with simlinks in the data directory, database can be backed up live [but not to my knowledge restored])
I am all ears. What has Oracle got that Postgres does not? The only thing I am aware of is the JVM built into the core of it and that it can be used as a versioning file system. Is there anything else?
I wish someone would PLEASE enlighten me as to what all these great secret enterprise features are that Oracle has that Postgres does not!
This is probably too late in the discussion for anyone to see this, but an interesting tidbit is that the $1 billion IBM is spending on Informix, they are spending on something.... that was made from the same codebase as Postgres!!!
Computer Associates' Ingres is another Postgres-based commercial database.
Of course, both these databases have many enterprise-level features Informix doesn't...
Integration is actually one of MSs biggest selling points. Look at it this way:
Oracle offers no "fully integrated solution", and you have to pay through the nose for it. Some would argue this is a good thing, and that's why they've got their niche pretty well cornered. Oracle's claims to reliability are at least as exaggerated as MS's and IBM's.
MS offers an integrated software solution. You get the hardware from junkyards if you want, but you've got to go MS from there on up. Compared to Oracle and IBM, this is by far the cheapest solution. It probably isn't the most reliable, but only time will tell if SQL2k breaks that mold.
IBM offers you a fully integrated solution, or at least that's the one they push hardest for. They want you to run IBM's DB with IBM's Java platform on IBM's OS on IBM's proprietary hardware, and that ain't cheap.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
Don't think IBM and Oracle wouldn't have done it in a heartbeat if they were even capable of it, though. Neither of them has been able to achieve this level of integration, no matter what they've done.
IBM can't do it, because no one in their right mind is going to buy IBM's proprietary hardware(remember the 80's?) without a few million to blow. It's incredible how fast people forget.
Oracle can't do it, because they're hoping Linux will provide them with the OS for free. Until Linux stabilizes more, they're still stuck without an OS. Again, it's incredible how fast people forget what it was like when Oracle and Sybase were the only solutions.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
They bought Lotus for $6 Billion. That's kind of like buying a yugo for $250,000.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Having been subjected to Lotus Notes for the past 6 years, I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about. I have yet to meet an IBM employee who likes Notes and I have yet to meet anyone outside IBM who uses it (MCI did for a while before moving to MS Outlook.) The fact that I (A rabid Linux fanatic) would prefer to use Microsoft products over Lotus products should be a damning enough indictment of any company and its software.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I received the following message from Informix. Personally I like Informix. I started using it due to customer requirements and took it on as a preferred DB before Postgres sped up. I was sceptical of commercial
databases. But having used Informix on a few projects I quite like it and have found it fast and stable, easy to install and it doesn't take THAT much out of a machine,
"Dear Valued Customer:
Informix and IBM recently announced an agreement for IBM to acquire the
Informix database business. IBM has a decades-long history of delivering
mission critical database solutions, starting on mainframes and growing
explosively in recent years on distributed Unix and Windows/NT platforms.
As you know, Informix is a leading provider of distributed database
management systems for business intelligence and transaction processing.
With the Informix acquisition, IBM strengthens its position in distributed
database increasing its ability to attract an even larger community of
application and services providers. Additionally, IBM and Informix share
common values of excellence in technology, outstanding customer support,
great business value and a focus on customer satisfaction.
We anticipate that the Informix acquisition will close in the third
quarter. Once the acquisition is complete, IBM will strive to maintain the
relationships and support that you value today. Our goal is to minimize
change to these sales, support and services relationships in the future,
and we expect that most of the Informix individuals you work with today
will continue to support you.
We know you have mission critical applications deployed on Informix
products and IBM will continue to execute Informix's strategy to support
and enhance existing Informix products for the foreseeable future. Over the
long term, IBM intends to integrate key Informix technologies into future
versions of DB2.
Database is a key growth area and IBM continues to make significant
investments in technology, sales, and customer support. With this
acquisition, IBM is investing an incremental $1B to ensure your future,
broader support by applications and services providers, and IBM's
commitment to your ongoing satisfaction.
Informix and IBM appreciate your investment in Informix solutions but we do
not take it for granted. The new IBM and Informix team will work hard to
earn your continued business, and looks forward to working with you to
leverage information in the 21st century.
Janet Perna
Jim Foy
Informix Software Inc
Tracy Williams
Lead Generation Manager
300 Lakeside Drive
Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: (510) 627-7589
Fax: (510) 835-1325
tracyw@informix.com"
Opening Informix source, Creating the low end part of their DB platform. Connecting Every product with it and other open source projects would boost Open Source OS.
Er, what *have* you been smoking?
The documentation for PostgreSQL is plentiful and clearly written.
Your point about blobs may be valid - I haven't used them yet - but AUTO_INCREMENT is just a dirty hack because MySQL can't do subselects, and therefore wouldn't be able to make much use of a PostgreSQL-style sequence anyway.
When you find the documentation (clue: it's on the web-site!), try making a list for your own amusement of features that MySQL has and PostgreSQL lacks, *and vice versa*.
I'm sorry, just feeling combative today.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
For starters, we know longer use MySQL, but we wrote a PHP generic DB class that lets us switch between PostgreSQL and MySQL (and will support other DBs that we add). As a DB designer, I hate MySQL. However, it isn't an embarassment.
Remember programming little BASIC toys? If you wanted to keep info you openned a random-access or sequential datafile? MySQL is a set of fast random-access datafiles. It is accessable via a subset of SQL, because people who are comfortable using databases with SQL find it easy.
If all you are doing is supporting a website (no delete operations) then the lack of foreign keys, etc., doesn't matter.
MySQL can be tricked into being useful. You just have to write EVERYTHING (and therefore QA A LOT) in the database. Unfortunately, it is reinventing the wheel.
PostgreSQL is a reasonable database. I don't know why MySQL gets all the credit. But if you have real database logic in your website, it is worth looking into PostgreSQL.
Alex
Your guess about expanding the customer base is as good as any I've heard. IFMX has a fairly large base in the GIS world and IBM would like to have that business. Where I work, Informix is the standard database on AIX boxes. IBM would like to supply both, and this is their opportunity to get a toehold where Oracle doesn't do so well.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
I think that's fine. MySQL is a nice software, but it obviously can't scale as far as Oracle can. It allows for a pretty cheap entry point (free or almost free). When you reach the point where you really need Oracle to keep running, believe me, buying an Oracle license is not going to be your biggest problem...
On UNIX & NT DB2 UDB is actually preetty cheap.
On linux it's free (as in beer.).
They are probably just after the Informix cutomer base, plus, there very nifty datawarehousing extensions.
Plus the cheapest way to recruit staff is to buy a company.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I have been watching the tech reports on the setiathome site to see how the db would handle the load. Nice of them to donate to the effort, and provide tech support.
Sybase is very prominent, in fact dominant, in the financial sector, and is certainly no less a player than Informix or Oracle.
There is no direct and definite correlation between their investment in Linux and their profitability. As someone else pointed out, it's only a small part of IBM. I remember about 7 years ago, when Microsoft's worth (back when it was still relatively small) was only about as much as IBM's AS/400 business line...
Do you know where they derive their profits from? Do you know how much profit did IBM turn on Linux specifically? I'm sure IBM can make Linux more profitable for them in the future than it is now, and it's just a matter of time. I have no doubt that open source and profitability are not mutually exclusive goals either.
In fact, I think the best way to make open source and Linux profitable is what IBM is doing, not necessarily what RedHat is doing. IBM provides more solutions. Whereas very often, RedHat just provide more questions (ok, it's just me).
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
uhh.. and Microsoft. Gack. What is it with this 'pretend they dont exist' thing - its not going to make them go away !
Oh, and don't mention the Transaction Processing Performance Councel, by Performance or by price/tpmC (a hint: MS has 10 of the... top ten), or heck, just overall!
Yes, MS has made some mistakes in the past, but they are learning from them and are making a quiet comeback. Nothing comes close to touching thier data mining/warehousing product.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but in terms of raw performance, MS SQL server 2000 doesn't cut it. Those performance figures are very interesting, so lets take a look in more detail.
In third place in raw performance is DB2 UDB, running on 128 700Mhz PIIIXeons. This manages 440879.96 TPC-C throughput.
In second place in raw performance is MS SQL2000, running on 192 700MHz PIIIXeons - 50% more processors than the DB2 UDB result. And the TPCC throughput? 505302.77 - a mere 15% more throughput. Not impressive.
In first place in this raw performance chart is another MS SQL2000 result, running on 280 900MHz PIIIXeons. Oh dear - they added another 50% more processors, upped the speed to 900MHz per chip and still only managed another 36% in TPCC throughput. I reckon that a linear fit should have shown about 55% more performance than their second place result to be competitive.
So you see - while MS has the money to buy lots of equipment to get impressive TPCC scores in raw performance, they need far more grunt from their hardware to provide equivalent performance to DB2.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
DB2 developer and therefore biased :-)
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
A clip from this story, posted today actually:
Using the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark, an industry-standard measure of server performance, a Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 equipped with 32 Intel Pentium III Xeon 32-bit processors supported 18,500 mySAP.com SD Standard Application benchmark users. This result is the third highest result ever recorded on any platform tested with the SAP SD benchmark methodology, regardless of the number of processors per server tested.
Oh, and don't mention the Transaction Processing Performance Councel, by Performance or by price/tpmC (a hint: MS has 10 of the... top ten), or heck, just overall!
Yes, MS has made some mistakes in the past, but they are learning from them and are making a quiet comeback. Nothing comes close to touching thier data mining/warehousing product.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Erm... how much scalability do you want? -> www.tpc.org. It not only wins every price/performance spot, it also has the top spot in overall performance. That's is not even the biggest news. Their PREVIOUS record was done with using half of the machines they used in the winning setup. They scored almost the half of the current record. So add twice as much machines, get twice as much performance. If that's not scalability, then what is?
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
With having invested $1 billion on Linux development, IBM has met expectations for the second quarter in a row. Now, they are purchasing Mainspring and Informix.
Who said that working with open source software wasn't profitable?
Ummmm....Sleepycat is a commercial embedded database. Sure, it's Open Source, but it's still commercial. The two adjectives "Open Source" and "Commercial" are not mutually exclusive.
IBM has been into the open source idea for a while now, if only to annoy MS. DB2 is IBM's baby so why are they going after something they already have?
Wishful thinking maybe, but could an open source informix be in the works to put onto their S/390, now z/whatever servers and go after certain other players in the DB field that are not even vaguely threatened by the open source movement.
It's an idea.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Metlife (the insurance company that has snoopy as their mascot) uses Lotus Notes quite a bit.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Informix was used to hold configuration information in the Foxboro IA DCS (Intellegent Automation Distributed Control System) used to control process plants (chemical, oil and gas, pulp and paper, metals and mining, food and pharmaceuticals, textiles, and power generation).
At the time it was released (1987), this was the only DCS that used a commercial database for configuration, and the only DCS that had a real filesystem (because the underlying OS was a flavor of Unix).
For a variety of reasons, Foxboro lost a lot of the DCS market, was bought by Siebe and the company was renamed Invensys.
The IA product might have evoloved away from using Informix -- one can not tell from the public website.
You pay money for support. When your entire company rides on the sanctity of a huge database (like a bank, for example), newsgroups just don't cut it for support. Oracle offers time-assured support (i.e., you database will be up in x hours under this support level).
Tell me (this is a serious question, not a troll): why would any company with an eye to the future lock themselves into a single-vendor, single-operating-system, single-hardware-platform solution?
What do you say to all those people who bought Informix? At least Microsoft will be around tomorrow.
Consider the IBM buy-out pure luck -- Informix filed for bankrupcy last year, during the largest IT boom market in recent memory, and basically were scrapping along until they could sell their customer list to someone. The future of Informix is migrating to DB2, I'm afraid.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Our company is moving to DB2 from MySQL as we speak...
Not trolling... but WHY on earth would you do this? MySQL certaintly doesn't suck, but it's NOT an RDBMS!
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Never mind, I'm an idiot and just reread the post - to early in the morning I guess :(... Just reverse my post: Cool that you're doing this! MySQL certaintly doesn't suck, but it's not an RDBMS like DB2 - good choice! ;)
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I wonder how this will affect IBM's DB/2...
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
The RDBMS can only be as good as the hardware and OS that it is running on. Give me HPUX, Sun, AIX, Mainframe (IBM DB2) -- and then try to build a WinTel machine that can scale??? Get real -- as soon as MS Sql Server can run on the above hardware/software combo's how can it be in the same ball park???? We are talking big data stores -- not the inventory for a lemonade stand. I work with this stuff everyday.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
By buying Informix (the other candidate being Sybase) IBM gets access to a significant amount of enterprise database customers and that was obviously worth a bundle and then some to them.
What I couldn't figure out yet, is why anybody spends a ton of Money on database licenses, when Postgresql provides a very viable alternative.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Haveny't you people ever heard of DataFlex from the Data Access Corporation???? www.dataaccess.com Or, Pervasive.SQL? Why must you people subjected to the advertisments of large corporations who choose your software for you. The above products are just as scalable and cost alot less (plus they have advantages).
What about Pervasive.SQL / Dataflex Solution?
"Smart companies save money by deploying MySQL instead of Oracle. They can invest that money in smart Linux developers and the NASDAQ."
That's the funniest thing I've seen all day. Someone's simply GOT to tag that as funny.
Tastes Like Chicken
A = "06"
IF A = "6" THEN CRT "Yup"
Most Basics this would result in no output, but in Universe the numeric evaluation takes precidence.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Currently, the best version I've heard is JBase, which allows coding in C, which addresses one of the great weaknesses of Pick, having to code in Basic.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Apparently MySQL, PostgreSQL and SleepyCat aren't exactly out of the running for comercial applications either. This article from the MySQL homepage tells of Oracle's creation of a migration kit for "upgrading" from MySQL to Oracle. At least one of the big few are starting to recognize that not everyone starts out using thousand dollar software.
Why wouldn't you consider Microsoft to be a player in the high-end database space? I think that over the next 5 or so years we will see SQL Server being used in places traditionally reserved for Oracle or DB2.
So this deal makes sense for IFMX.
BUT WHY is IBM doing it??????
The informix database doesn't offer a huge leap in technology over DB2.
Could they simply want to expand their customer base? Are they just buying clients?? Very strange.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
Will this consolidation open the door for object or object/relational databases.
It would seem as choices narrow in relational databases it might be easier to sell alternative technologies.
We use Intersystems Cache, it is an object relational database.
IBM and Oracle products are hardware scalable. This could also open up the door for smaller less feature rich, but nimbler, databases in the mid to low end of the markey.
Before this aquisition, the main players were Oracle and IBM (think DB2). I'm not sure why this aquisition was thought nescesary.
To those who say what about MS SQL, well... MS SQL is easy to use. It main threat is that it is easy to use and cheap to get so people keep trying to use it in places that Oracle should be used. MS in turn tries to accomodate these people, so while MS SQL isn' too much of a threat yet, it each new version moves it further up the scale of what it can do. I'd say at least two more versions are needed before it will really be ready for a direct assult on Oracle or DB2.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
--
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
If Microsoft binds the operation of their desktop this intimately to their servers, IBM and Oracle will be pounding on the Attorney General's door the very next morning. This is an anti-competetive, exclusionary tying tactic similar to what got their collective corporate ass in hot water in the first place. Not that I don't think they'd try to do something like this....
does cloudscape go to IBM as well? i have not played with it much, but on the surface it seems to be a good product. hopefully it will go somewhere with IBM's interest in java.
A while ago, Informix acquired a software company called Ardent Software which had a decent database technology portfolio (the Universe RDBMS). It has (had?) some big customers. Haven't seen any comment on this component of Informix yet.
-- Trolled...you WILL be === Yoda
Why did this thread even come up? A PC Database running the same Databases run on HP-UX, AIX, OS/390, Solaris? Not likely. Have you heard of jBASE? www.jbase.com (free development (full) versions available)