In my opinion

Today I renamed the title of my blog page to “In my opinion” because the original title will no longer get any use. Just for posterity, I posted a copy of the original title page..

Yesterday I accepted a position with an organization that does not have Informix. They are 99% Oracle and 1% SQL Server. So, I think I will rename this blog to “In My Opinion” because I will no longer need to use it as a release of frustration on the inadequacies of Informix. Sure there will be bumps and mishaps in the Oracle environment but I know I will have a plethora of information available to resolve problems. This will also help me to become more marketable for future positions. Goodbye Informix..

The job market is one big factor in my low support of the Informix product. I remember the days in the late 90’s, before IBM acquired them, when the company went through three CEO’s in three years. Eventually one of them, Phil White, went to prison…. When my days at Dillon Companies, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kroger Company, were coming to an end in 2001, I was busy searching the job boards like Dice.com. I knew the job market for an Informix DBA was limited but I had no idea how harsh it would be. After a few months on severance pay I was able to find a job as an Oracle DBA. Today, I still have my Dice.com account send me daily job postings based on two agents. One is set up for Informix and the other looks for Oracle jobs. About 99% of the time the Informix job agent returns the following message. Sorry, no jobs posted today!!! The Oracle agent returns something every day…

It’s been a while since my last post to this Blog. After trying to solve an Informix stored procedure language (SPL) problem yesterday I thought now would be a good time to do a post on Informix documentation and how poor it is on the IBM Web site to find anything. The problem was with nested FOREACH commands and not exiting out of one when another is complete. Informix has 50 pages dedicated to the SPL statements and yes, you can nest FOREACH statements. But very little is mentioned on control logic after an explicit exit foreach is used, and zero, nil, nada, zilch examples are given. Also, if you are looking for a good book to purchase on Informix, good luck. Most books available on www.bn.com are from the 90’s. If you do happen to find a current book on Informix it is limited in substance. Looking at my shelf at work I counted 10 books on Oracle and probably have as many at home. Two of my favorite Oracle books are by Tom Kyte. If you want to get a real in depth understan

According to the ZEND Developer Zone, http://devzone.zend.com/ PHP support for Informix has been moved to the PECL, the PHP Extension Community Library. http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1621#Heading11 “In other CVS news, Tony moved ext/informix out of the core in PHP_5_2 branch and CVS HEAD. The extension now resides in PECL CVS, but has no maintainer at the time of writing. The actively maintained pecl/pdo_informix extension should be used in new code.” So what does the mean… I don’t know the exact details other than to build a PHP environment for Informix support requires more work effort. Out of box, ( gzip download), PHP has support for a number of database platforms. Of course, the Open Source DB’s, Msql and PostgreSQL are supported along with some of the ones that cost a few $$’s like Oracle and DB2. I also found it interesting that Adabase and SAP DB is supported but Informix was dropped. With the latest release of Informix 11 the administration tool is OpenAdmin Tool which

After the past couple of days, IBM has added more logs to the fire on the inadequacies of the Informix database product. Over the past 6 months I have been involved in upgrading several environments from Informix 7.x to Informix 10.0. We went through the normal lifecycle process and did as much regression testing as possible for each application. Between standby and development environments we upgraded roughly eight environments with 20+ databases. The term database in Informix is a little different than Oracle. An Informix database would be similar to an Oracle schema… Everything was fine until the largest OLTP database was upgraded in production. Although regression testing was completed, not every single possible transaction was tested. As it turns out one transaction that slipped through the cracks would come back to bite us right in the ass and would bring the database instance to its knees. It turned out to be a complex view that has 15 tables and 18 CASE statements in the defini

As an Informix DBA, I always experienced problems with software companies not supporting Informix. The most recent problem occurred about six months ago with the software company DataFlux, (a SAS company). By the way, I would highly recommend this software to anybody looking for a data quality tool. Using the ODBC driver supplied by DataFlux it would not allow simple date (yyyy/mm/dd) or date time (yyyy/mm/dd:hh:mm:ss) to be inserted into an Informix table with defined data types of date or datetime. This was not a big deal because I still could use the ODBC driver supplied by Informix but is just shows the lack of vendor support for Informix. I did a Google search for “Informix vendor support” and found a posting on the International Informix User Group (IIUG) for “Vendors not support Informix version 10” which is a listing of vendors that do not support the Informix database. http://www.iiug.org/forums/informix-forum/index.cgi/noframes/read/28 Here is the list as of 3/2/2006:

I have worked with Informix software for more than 15 years. I remember as a Unix administrator being handed a streaming tape and told to install the software that was on it. I remember after using the cpio command to extract the contents of the tape to the hard drive I had a bunch of files .dat and .idx. I believe it was version 4 something and the tool to manage the database, dbaccess, was not purchased so any changes made to the database had to be done with a 4gl program. Since then I have worked as a DBA using versions 5.x, 7.x, 9.x, and, most recently, 10.00.FC6. In 2001 I was exposed to Oracle 8i, and in 2002 I passed five tests to become an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) for 8i. Since then I have passed the tests to become 9i and 10g certified, which is the main reason for creating this blog. I needed a place to write down all of the shortcomings that Informix has compared to Oracle. Not necessarily for anyone to read but for me to have a place to express my frustrations wi