In my opinion

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