Overview
What is IBM Informix?
Informix is an embedded relational database offering from IBM.
IBM Informix is an Effective Cloud Platform for the Multiple Services Automation.
A point of view on Informix IDS and tools
IBM Informix, the unknown wonderful database
Informix, still the RDBMS of choice among those who have used it.
The Basal Stone.
Best of breed for critical production environments, and IOT infras from top to bottom
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Pricing
What is IBM Informix?
Informix is an embedded relational database offering from IBM.
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What is IBM Informix?
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Reviews and Ratings
(15)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Reliable Database Management
- Data management
- Hybrid data capabilities
- Project management
- The support system.
- Efficiency when working with remote databases.
- Public integration with open source softwares.
- Open admin tool
- Client Software development
- Datablade developers kit
- Enhanced decision making
- Improved cost management
- Revenue growth
- The SQL capability is effective.
- Project management is very simple.
- Data transfer speed is profitable.
- No major on this system just the security setting.
- Big data transfer slows performance.
- Ability to manage huge amount of different data type requires a professional.
- The data mining tools.
- Cloud services management features.
- Ability to create real time data analytics.
- IBM Informix has been an helpful data migration platform.
- The best data mining and data extraction functionalities are very reliable and easy to collect feedback.
- Cloud services Automation and great Orchestration platform.
IBM Informix, the unknown wonderful database
- High scalability.
- Easy to maintain.
- Great user group (IIUG).
- Highly embeddable.
- Can be expensive for the top editions.
- Transactional operations.
- Embedded database, like in IoT.
- Full end to end IoT integration.
- Solutions requiring database extensibility.
- Support for hybrid data structures (relational and NoSQL).
- Storing text data, even if the text datablade is a great product, now integrated, it is not designed for this.
- Ease of use.
- Quick ROI.
- Efficient community.
The Basal Stone.
Informix was very stable, robust, reliable and with great performance, this is why it was the main platform. In the DB farm, Informix had the highest uptime, with the lowest outages, even planned ones were very short. In addition to Informix we were using Oracle/SQLSvr and MySQL. It had the least number of technical issues, and never had to be patched due to the quarterly received vulnerability patching report (Please check this Patching Vulnerability Analysis in my Blog, it is in Spanish, but nowadays can be easily translated to any language.
In terms of business problems, Informix always suffered from the lack of and emptiness of marketing and very bad management, to the point, to make many people think that Informix was a dead or became an old engine! Now with the latest agreement between IBM and HCL, we hope this could change for better and improve in the following years.
- Informix since its conception has a distinct multi-threading architecture no other engine has, it is unique of its kind. This is precisely how the engine is able to scale up like no other, with the lowest footprint, without killing the host and profiting each bit of the hardware. The threads are sub-proceses like any other one, but the difference is that they are are not controlled by the OS process dispatcher. This is why you will never be able to see these threads running at OS level. Informix is an OS itself, on top of the OS.
- Informix has the best replication techniques. Not many ppl know that MongoDB (the NoSQL engine) scales out because of its data sharding replication technology, and Informix is able to store Mongo BSON documents using the same data partitioning as MongoDB does. This way Informix extends the SQL or structured data with the unstructured data natively, together within the same data repository. This means that it is not only able to store JSON/BSON documents, but the engine is able to behave as it would be the MongoDB engine itself. Any application using MongoDB can be redirected to the Informix Mongo wire listener transparently. What´s more, it also improves the NoSQL (BASE) characteristic, making it ACID by allowing transactions to the CRUD operations. This last is something MongoDB is working on, promised to be delivered next year.
- As described previously, MongoDB's sharding concept relies on data partitioning, this is how it scales out, and as I also described previously Informix scales up given the described multithreading unique architecture! It implements the data sharding with one of its best replication technologies called Enterprise Replication. This is an Active-Active replication technology that allows replicating even between different platforms. This is actually how I managed to migrate the whole Informix platform from Solaris to Linux, with just a DNS change. There was almost ZERO downtime nor application change - this was really amazing!.
- 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.
This is why Informix is able to adapt to almost any sort of environment and satisfy almost any sort of requirement, even if the requirement is to be embedded in hardware! This last is possible because it it requires zero support and maintenance, as it can be self tuned and self healed. One of the main scenarios which is nowadays getting promoted for is the IoT one. Starting from mid 90's Informix incorporated the extensibility concept through the datablades it had brought from Illustra. This is why it is pioneer in the TimeSeries and GeoSpatial (tracking moving objects) technology, with the fastest and best storing TimeSeries techniques and GeoSpatial functionalities. The Wire Listener is one of the best features Informix has introduced to its suit of functionalities, can work in three different scenarios API types: MQTT, REST and MONGO, supporting IoT, MongoDB (an application using MongoDB can be redirected as it is to Informix-Mongo without changes) and able to understand HTTP functions (POST, GET, PUT, etc).
- As I have explained earlier, Informix has had along the past 15 years, the lowest number of vulnerability defects reported in NVD. Informix allows you to disregard the vulnerability defects, and spend your time building and growing your business instead of wasting it in patching and fixing every quarter! This to me is the best example I can empirically prove that Informix is definitely one of the best return of investment and so that any CDO or CIO should pay attention at the time to consider what platform to chose, to build on top!
- The other return of investment any CDO or CIO should pay attention to, is the number of DBAs a DB platform should be required to support it! Informix with the SELF-everything, is getting chosen by companies as the best suited engine given its low footprint and little maintenance to get it embedded in their hardware.
- Given its uptime and minimum planned outages Informix allows you to have, it is yet another reason Informix is not means an investment and not a money waste!
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 is very stable. It has stayed up and running for years. The only downtimes we had were due to planned power outages. This is a mandatory quality required in a industrial environment.
- Informix has a very rich and extended replication system that allows many useful functionalities:
- High Availability
- Tables or part of tables replication, both ways
- Replication patterns like 1 to many servers and sharing storage between 2 servers
- All these replication techniques can be combined together and we love the simplicity of their set up.
- Informix has been featuring NoSQL datatype ( JSON/BSON) for almost 5 years now, including the NoSQL MongoDB style language.
- Once you have loaded your MongoDBdata into Informix, you can run any application compatible with the MongoDB 3.0 stack
- The biggest advantage of this solution is that you can execute joins with SQL Structured tables and NoSQL collections alltogether, either in SQL language or in NoSQL language.
- I heard recently that Informix is available on AWS, with a very wide range of configurations from very small to very big. This is something we would like to look at
- Informix runs on gateway devices, like for instance Raspberry PI / Arm based nano computer or Intel Quark based. This is the same product that works on bigger platforms, including the replication architecture that makes IOT applications much easier to develop and maintain.
- Informix is also directly accessible thru the REST protocol, with is a great asset for IOT applications, based on Node JS, Python, running on nanocomputers. This makes those applications much tinier in terms of resource comsumption, as well as efficient.
- The name of Informix is almost invisible on the market, which is very frustrating. This give the feeling that IBM is not interested in Informix without providing any reasons for why IBM makes no effort to sell Informix.
- The pricing policy is very complex
- demanding industrial automation processing
- infrastructures required complex replication schemas, with servers located on different places/regions/countries
- Applications intensively using timestamp and or geospatial
- Simplifying DBMS by using at the same time SQL and NoSQL, needless to use separately RDBMS and NoSQL DBMS
- Amazingly low requirements for DBA staff, in general, Informix is good for companies who like simplicity and efficiency
- Informix being a pay-for solution, it may not be recommended for companies who do not want to spend money for a DBMS,
- Also Informix is not good for companies who refuse to consider anything than the top 5
- 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
- PostgreSQL, Oracle and MS SQL Server
- 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.