Re: Oracle vs Informix

I attended DB2/IMS Tech conference in Hamburg this spring and the IMS folks announced a bunch of new features and enhancements.

Did they announce OO for IMS? No, will they at anytime in the future? Unlikely.
They anounce features around scalabily and usability.

Informix's main line DBMSs (IDS and XPS) are IMHO unlikely to continue development under as much steam in releases past the commited ones. It's a lot wiser to invest resources into making DB2 an easy migration path with a superset of the functionality and to ensure DB2 can seamlessly talk to your Informix database so you don't have to migrate your application ever but you can still take advantage of new, sexy features hitting DB2 (implemented with the help and expertise of Informix developers).

DB2 b.t.w. is the only DBMS that has the technology to do that. Oracle Transparent Gateway will not help you because it does only datashipping. It's bound to be slow when you have to ship resultsets across DBs for a cross system query.
So Oracle wants you to abandon ship - they have to. (Get rid of everything you have today and start from scratch as a 100% Oracle shop). IBM wants you to stay put.
Pick up DB2 in some future for new applications if you so desire and need it and have DB2 talk to your Informix DB, your Oracle DB or whatever you have flying around there.

Sorry for the obvious bias - that's what I really think - can't help it.

Cheers
Serge Received on Tue May 01 2001 - 07:18:58 CDT