I think that Informix architecture is more elegant, more thought of,
more like well-designed from ground up compared to Oracle.
But this is just my personal view. And I am just starting to understand
more about Oracle -- most of my experience in db tuning/troubleshooting
was with Informix.
- I think Informix is a lot easier to maintain especially for organizations
where people use many Database instances (like development shops).
It is a lot lighter on resources. For example if I have 10 databases --
I do not need 10 separate database instances with their own data files,
index files, temp files -- I rather allocate those spaces for a
database server -- and all the databases on that database server
can use the same db space same index same rollback. The same
goes about memory allocation.
So if out of those 10 databases only 4 are used actively, the space/memory
resource is not wasted by the database server -- it is just being used as
needed.
In oracle, as I understand, if the other 6 databases are not used actively,
no one can use their data file space or index space, etc. So a DBA has
to constantly be figuring out what DBs are not used and reduce the resource
allocation for them.
We had to purchase more servers when we migrated from Informix to Oracle,
just because Oracle asked for a lot more when it comes down to maintaining
multiple databases (we have about 30 to 50).
- If you just look at the number of configuration switches for Performance
tuning -- Informix has a lot less. But the concepts behind those switches
are very powerful, that is why I think that Informix is architecturally more
elegant and well thought off. For example, one of the most important
things for OLTP applications is to be able to distribute the databaseaccess
across as many CPUs as possible and as many disk spindles as possible
to achieve concurrency on the database server side. Well, Informix has
an notion of Virtual CPUs and Virtual IO CPUs . You can attach (ping)
a virtual CPU to a physical CPU of your DB server, and depending
on I/O requirements you can configure number of I/O CPus.
This virtual CPU concept allows (again in my view) to easier monitor
performance of the server, and figure out load balancing issues
(you can see what each virtual CPU is doing).
Oracle on the other hand, has myriad switches per DB instance, per server,
etc.
- Informix supports page locking, row locking, table locking concepts
on per table level. It also supports the ability for locks to timeout in
a given interval -- and this is configurable per each individual database
connection! For our OLTP application it was very important as we,
from the application, could identify what transaction take longer then
needed because of lock waiting and do something about it.
- As far as stored procedures go -- I do not understand what
you mean by one line at a time. Stored procedures are compiled
by the database engine and cached the first time they are executed.
And never recompiled again (until you explicitly ask for it). They are
fast. In fact, once they are executed the first time -- you will not
see the stored procedure text anymore in your SQL EXPLAIN --
that is because Informix optimizer knows they are compiled
and just calls the stored proc in binary form.
- even earlier version of Informix supported table partitioning
and by now all the bugs are hopefully out of the system (I understand
that table partitioning support has been available in Oracle 8).
Oracle has more books written about it, I guess, a lot better marketing,
and has more money to spend in investing in interesting technologies like
XML. Also, they now have a few former Informix folks working for them.
Vladislav,
Just my biased opinions.
Chris Moehring <chris.moehring_at_txucom.com> wrote in message
news:37B42612.292BB35B_at_txucom.com...
> I am considering purchasing Informix's IDS rather than Oracle's 8.
>
> I have heard that
> 1) Informix was faster than Oracle but much harder to maintain.
> 2) Harder to get support for Informix. People don't want to mess with
> it.
> 3) Stored procedures have to be done one line at a time with
> Informix....very
> time consuming.
>
> I am please with the speed but the last thing that we need right now is
> server/software taking up our time to maintain.
>
> Can anyone address the validity of these statements?
>
> Thanks,
> Chris
>
Received on Fri Aug 13 1999 - 21:06:51 CDT
