Re: Oracle or Informix,, which is better?

Peter Karouzos wrote:

[stuff deleted]

> I have found Informix to have a strong architecture, a better
> implementation of parallel queries and good data partitioning features.
> However, I have found some annoying limitations. There is a limited number
> of string functions.eg no upper or uppercase function,

You can write a Stored Proc that does this for you.

> no datatype to
> support variable length columns above 500 characters

Why not use TEXT blobs? It's fairly easy to use them through PowerBuilder.

> and no efficient way
> of maintaining columns through triggers other than using an SQL update
> statement.
>

I don't follow. What do you mean?

> An important issue is locking. They both support row level locking however
> Informix does take shared locks on reads and row level locking is not the
> default. (I am assuming you do not like dirty reads).

This depends on your isolation level. If you use commited read, shared locks will only be placed while the row is beeing read, so that is usually not a problem. To change the lockmode of a table is so easy that it can't be an issue.

>
> Oracle and Informix have the best RDBMS and it is hard to separate them.
> Their respective version 8 products could help you differentiate between
> the two.

I'd look for features in Informix Universal Server which will be an Object-Relational database. Oracle8 is mostly a catch-up product to Informix 7.2. (Data partitioning etc.)

>
> On balance I suggest Oracle. Their product has the benefit of being the
> leading RDBMS for a long time.
>

If one looks closely at the architectures of these two databases, it doesn't take a rocket scientist :-) to see that Informix is the winner, especially if you take into account the extensibility of Informix Universal Server. And regarding beeing the "leading" RDBMS: Oracle has the biggest revenue of the RDBMS vendors. It even had that position with Oracle 6.x which at that time was regarded the most inferior DBMS on the market in terms of technical merit (in comparison with Informix 5.x, Sybase 4.x and Ingres 6.x).

Nuff said,

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Snorri Bergmann                    | Mail:       snorri_at_strengur.is
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