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:
SAP
Stellent (formerly Accorde/Optika )
BMC - Patrol Database tools (to work with the rest of their tools); SQL Back Track
Khalix
PeopleSoft
Vantive
Ecommerce Broadvision
Cadquest
Rockport
Kronos
Lawson
MapInfo
As this list grows I wonder why any company would purchase Informix for any new projects.
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:
SAP
Stellent (formerly Accorde/Optika )
BMC - Patrol Database tools (to work with the rest of their tools); SQL Back Track
Khalix
PeopleSoft
Vantive
Ecommerce Broadvision
Cadquest
Rockport
Kronos
Lawson
MapInfo
As this list grows I wonder why any company would purchase Informix for any new projects.
Comments
You should use a parameterized query and bind a SQL_Date. If you must write the date directly inline-SQL why not use the ODBC escape syntax?
I'm sure there will be plenty of Informix support available from http://www.openlinksw.com/
I would agree it is and ODBC and API programmer issue. The point I was trying to get across, which I didn’t do to well, is that 3rd party support for Informix in not high on a vendors list and never has been. DataFlux acquired the ODBC driver from OpenLink but probably never tested the drivers against Informix or did not do an insert of date values in testing.
DataFlux has since fixed the problem but the time spent analyzing the issue caused some frustration and when I ran the same job against an Oracle database, everything worked fine.