IBM Informix creates an effective and secure channel for easy and quick data management and transfer across other major Cloud platforms and other data storage systems. The analytical ability is also the best and most effective visual functionalities and the encryption and the data archiving functionalities are great and easy on reporting.
If you have to manage a lot of different databases from different vendors, you could do well by standardizing on this product. It checks all the boxes for a proper database management studio. You would only have to learn one product to manage them all. However, if you are looking to find a good product for a single database vendor, you might be better off finding a tool that was designed specifically for that vendor product.
Excellent Data Warehouse performance from the basic engine. Outstanding Data Warehouse performance from the Informix Warehouse Accelerator module.
Best embedability among major RDBMS systems.
Scalable from the smallest Raspberry PI up to the largest monolithic systems and out to dozens of distributed nodes.
Hybrid data capabilities to merge relational data with time seriesv, geospacial data, JSON data and other non-traditional data types with performance comparable or better than systems dedicated to those data types.
Foreign Key Constraint data viewer! This was a tremendously helpful feature that not many other products have. Just pick a constraint and see the data in the child tables! No setup required!
It is very difficult to find a missing functionality in Informix, technically is great. I will again criticize the business side and how it has been managed over the past, I hope this could be improved with HCL's help. I know they are working hard, but we need to start letting the world know and revert their concept about its existence and that it is one of the best competitors within the data treatment, in the market. We need to start telling the world about success cases and stories showing this and backing up its strong technology.
Somewhat laggy performance. Boot up speed was on the slow side and connecting to our database servers was also a little slower than other products.
User interface can be a little clunky. Instead of the usual tree view of servers, databases, and schemas, you are presented with lists that you click on and get new windows to pick the new list of data from. Not organized efficiently.
IBM Informix creates effective solutions for big data extraction and data transportation functionalities across the entire Cloud services and the Automation ability is the best. The security that IBM Informix provides for all our business data and other project information and contacts is effective and the reports are very clean and easy to understand.
Compared to Microsoft's SQL Management Studio, Valentina studio was comparable, just harder to get used to in the UI department. It ran slightly slower than other products but did save some time with neat features they baked into the product. However, in using DBeaver Community and DBForge Studio for PostgreSQL from Devart, we found different products that the team ultimately decided to use. DBeaver has all of the features we needed most (minus the constraint data viewer) and a more intuitive UI that we were used to. DBForge Studio for PostgreSQL has a very standard Windows look and feel and lacks some features, like database/table designers, but makes up for those shortcomings in the much easier filtering and sorting options right in the data grids. You can even write a query and edit the data returned, which is something we don't see in many of these tools. Our team ultimately settled on the developers using DBeaver and the support team that needs data viewing/editing capabilities using DBForge Studio.
Although I do not own nor have visibility on my company's figures:
Informix generates consistent savings on DBA staffing, no need for many DBAs as other DBMS require.
The replication architecture allowed consistent savings in the infrastructure as well as developments and maintenance, the job is already done, no need to develop complex and costly solutions, it's just a matter of configuring it.
The advantages of hybrid development (i.e mixing SQL and NoSQL in the same database) is not just a marketing hype: it allowed us to solve with a brilliant solution, in one afternoon of coding, a functional problem we have been having for more than 10 years!
The biggest drawback is that IBM pricing may be constraining, it has too important gaps between the mid range and highrange in terms of pricing
