IBM Informix

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.

IBM Informix unlike the tools above 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.

You could use any other relational database, but they will be either expensive to maintain or won't scale as much.

I have participated in evaluations of Informix versus most of its competing RDBMS engines. In all of those evaluations, when performance, ease of maintenance, ROI, and effort required to train staff to proficiency are the criteria of decision, Informix has always been the choice.

As a DB Team Leader I have been looking after other platforms (SQLSvr, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL), supporting application changes, and driving their platforms enhancements through lots of projects over many years. The more I have learnt from other platforms, the more I found Informix as the easiest and most convenient platform to administer and implement.
I never had the chance to decide over the DB platform, but if I had to, no doubt I would seriously consider it. After all I have explained about its characteristics, I can definitely say that Informix has the lowest cost ownership, and it is the best one suited and prepared for the current and future challenges.

• Informix vs. Oracle: although both products are real enterprise-class DBMS, satisfying robustness and scalability criteria, Informix is much more easy and simple to admin. It requires much fewer resources in terms of DBA staffing for an equivalent infrastructure on Oracle. Also, we have noticed that Informix consumes noticeably less hardware resource than Oracle for an identical level of performance. This is probably due to the Informix real-multithread architecture.
• Informix vs. MS SQL Server: we do not consider Microsoft as a reliable platform for a database server, at least for critical service
• Informix vs. PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL is a great product: it seems to scale nicely, very rich in terms of SQL language, has a nice implementation of NoSQL too. Nonetheless, we have doubts about the ease of version upgrading, an operation that generally takes less than 2 minutes with Informix, even on production systems. Also, it seems that the replication architecture is not as clear nor complete as Informix' replication, probably due to the fact of not having a unique software architect. We like to have a unique contact for the product maintenance and not a community.

Those criteria [helped] us to keep Informix as the preferred DBMS, despite many people around totally ignore it. What a waste!