Re: Advice on picking a database (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, SQL Server

Ken Denny <kdenny_at_interpath.com> wrote:
...snip...

:On a recent project we were evaluating Oracle vs Informix. Although
:Informix had a lot of good things going for it, what made us settle on
:Oracle was that there was one place in the application where we had a
:table which used two columns (SITE and NAME) as its primaty key. We
:needed to start with a particular site and name and select all rows from
:there to the end of the table. The where clause in our select statement
:was:
:WHERE SITE > START_SITE OR (SITE = START_SITE AND NAME >= START_NAME)
:Because there was an "OR" in the where clause Informix couldn't figure
:out that it could use the index and so did a full table scan.
A union would have done this and used the index: SELECT ...
FROM ...
WHERE SITE > START_SITE
union all
SELECT ...
FROM ...
WHERE SITE = START_SITE AND NAME >= START_NAME
: Oracle,
:on the other hand, was able to use the index.
Granted this is better, and Informix realy should have done it as well.

: There are other things
:though that I like about Informix better than Oracle (Descending Indexes
:come to mind).

The Universal Server from Informix is the biggest differentiator.

Nils.Myklebust_at_idg.no
NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company
The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org Received on Thu Feb 27 1997 - 00:00:00 CST