Re: informix market share

I would agree with Xiaoxin. We just found out with our renewal that IBM is much more expensive than Oracle.
We love Informix and had never even considered switching from Informix to any other db until we got our renewal quote. Since the "best and final" quote from IBM is still four to five times what Oracle is quoting, we will soon be implementing a head to head comparison between Oracle and Informix.

When the cost of Oracle is 150K versus 750K for Informix IDS the comparison is just a formality.

The difference for us is towfold:
1) We require relatively simple replication. For Informix, any E.R. replication
requires IDS, but Oracle allows simple bi-direction table subsets in the Oracle
equivalent of Informix Workgroup.

2) We reworked our front end app using VB with ODBC. In the old application we took one access hit per
named user, now one user accounts for four or five server connections due to multiple background
db access (I don't know if it is a VB or a ODBC thing).

-Oracle only charges a premium price for full database sync in what
they call multi-master replication.

-Oracle has either a per processor charge or a named user charge where
one named user equals one
database access even in VB/ODBC.

They also have built in web development tools that seem (from the Oracle sales guy) to take the place of
some Informix development tools. I have doubs about this though.

So most likely we will be heading down the Oracle highway (reluctantly) due to the lower cost. Received on Mon Nov 28 2005 - 10:24:13 CST