Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!shadooby!sharkey!bnlux0!adelphi!promark!mark
From: mark@promark.UUCP (Mark J. DeFilippis)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: INFORMIX bugs info requested
Summary: The reports are not Bug reports
Message-ID: <192@promark.UUCP>
Date: 8 Oct 89 03:10:26 GMT
References: <1989Sep24.214421.7162@alberta.uucp> <1680001@teecs.UUCP>
Organization: Promark Data Concepts, Garden City, NY
Lines: 59

In article <1680001@teecs.UUCP>, belkin@teecs.UUCP (Hershel Belkin) writes:
> I would normally e-mail this, but given the tone of a previous response
> I felt an obligation to publicly state my experiences with Informix (and
> let me assure you that I have no "connections" with Informix! :-)
> 
> We have used Informix-4GL for about a year now, to re-develop an

Our experience with Informix-4GL was from day 1 when they put their
first product out.

> 
> Although the development cycle was not without its problems, we found
> Informix-4GL (and SQL) to perform very well, both in terms of system
> performance, and in terms of ease of development.  I was most impressed

We had to try many complex (outer join) queries, and found usually the
optimizer on the backend didn't work the way it was supposed to.
eg. It would select all the rows in the larger of the two tables 
and then do the join even though _composite_ indexes existed for one
or both tables.  I could go on and on.

> with the fact that we did not need to resort to any code outside of

We had simple needs. We needed to develop 30% of our code in C, just to do
simple things like read lines in a file, or get a user id number, write
a log file, the real tough stuff...

> we receive a quarterly (I think) journal containing
> known bug work-arounds, technical tips, and other interesting articles.

That is not a bug report, it is a tech magazine that makes you feel like
the big $$$ you are laying out for support is worth it.  A bug report
is a sequenced list of bug numbers, and a short description of what they
plan on doing about it.   Bugs are usually fixed when Informix comes out with
a full release.  We took the product through only 3 releases in 3 years.
I don't know what release they are at, but it took three years to go
from 1.00.00, to 1.00.05B to 1.10.00A if I remember correctly.  A year is
a long time to wait for a fix.  Each time we had to change/remove all the
bug fixes we provided work-arounds for prior to the release because they fixed
some of them.

At one time I had the name of every manager within Informix, and discussed
several issues with Roger Sipple, the president of Informix.  We were
almost sued by our client, but after discussing our Informix problem,
they had their legal staff draw up a letter to Informix instead.
Nothing ever came of it, and the project was never completed.

When it looked like it might become a legal matter, we started keeping logs
of all conversations, etc. with Informix.  We still have some of them, but
not on disk, even compressed, they take up too much room. :-)

I still have to deal with Informix at the University.  We use Informix-sql
and Esql/C for a Computer Science course on our Unix box.  Thank God
undergraduates only write 100 line programs, not much can go wrong
with simple select of two rows and a simple join.

Have they changed or have they just gotten bigger?
-- 
Adelphi University, Garden City, NY 11530                   (516) 663-1170
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
                                 markd@adelphi.UUCP  or  mark@promark.UUCP
                      UUCP:      ...philabs!sbcs!bnlux0!adelphi!markd