IBM Informix Reviews

I have assisted a wide range of customers in strategic and/or critical applications, such as:

• Health Care: Informix is at the epicenter of all the biggest private hospital consortia in Belgium, concentrating critical and real-time data.
• Laboratories: Informix is the center of several environment control quality software.
• Telco: Informix handles the biggest Mobile operator in Southern Europe.
  
• Insurance: Several companies in Europe and India. 
• Banking: Informix as a central platform for a number of medium-size banks in Europe and Africa.
• Real-time industry: Informix manages data for big battery plants in France. 
• Government: Ministry of Education and Ministry of Justice. 

Most of these customers were running on Unix based installations, like AIX, Solaris, HPE, and Linux.

1. Whenever a DBMS is the central piece of an application, Informix provides a very high rate of reliability. E.g., some customers show Informix uptime of 10 years.
2. The flexibility of its replication architecture allows for achieving easy high availability + DRP + enterprise type replication. 
3. Its hybrid data model allow for concurrent handling of structured data (SQL), custom data types and handling methods, unstructured data (NoSQL), and soon graph data.
   
4. The very low level of DBA staffing necessary to handle many instances. Some customers handles tens of thousands of Informix instances with barely more than two handfuls of DBAs.
5. For any customer involved in IoT, Informix is just the best solution from edge to central servers. Informix Entreprise works great on edge devices as well as central servers, including massively parallel architecture and in-memory OLAP. DataBlades, like TimeSeries, are the best ever way to implement any application based on time based data in a very massive way.

• Very flexible with extended replication architecture. It has great responses to complex requirements, implemented easily, and is easy to maintain.
• Easily scalable, vertically and horizontally 
• Hybrid data: Does SQL and NoSQL in the same queries, providing simple answers to complex scenarios
• Onboard DataBlades like TimeSeries, Spatial, node, etc.
• Warehouse Accelerator easily plugs into OLTP instances and deals with OLAP queries with extreme performance (query response times divided up to 700).
• For IoT business cases, having Informix Enterprise Edition work on edge computers, like Raspberry Pi and using Informix replication, makes complex situations simple to build and maintain. 
  

• Continue extending the SQL language for compatibility with the competition's language, including Stored Procedure Language.
• Be more active in the open source community.
• Regain occupation of VAR and BP fields.
• Regain occupation in software makers.
• The product needs a lot more marketing involvement from IBM. Some customers simply believe that Informix does not exist anymore due to the heavy silence of IBM Salesforce.
  

34 years as an end user, developer, and solution architect.

Many customers that I have met or talked to report uptimes of five or six years. Our identified record is no downtime over 10 years.

Informix was one of the very first DBMS implementing a real multithreaded architecture in early 1990s. This architecture is now bulletproof and continues enhancing at every release.

Informix scales great vertically (on the same machine) and horizontally (on other machines). The query sharding technology, although implemented a few years ago, was developed on Informix in the early 2000s on a data warehouse specific Informix product.

Technical support is generally very efficient. I have never had a bad experience with the tech support. Sometimes, the delays seem a bit long, but they respect deadlines.

After having developed on hierarchical DBMSs (HPE images + Visual Basic) for a number of years, I wanted to replace this wonderful but dying platform with a more modern one. I had requirements on DBMS functionality and language possibilities. This is when I starting looking at emerging platforms (the 1980s).

Once the DBAs are correctly trained on the product, setup is generally trouble-free. People attending the IBM training on Informix quickly become very knowledgeable on the product.

Informix is very powerful. It renders high levels of performance with amazingly low level of hardware resource consumption. In many cases, for moderate-size implementations, the low level editions are enough to handle the workload, taking care of which functionality or limitation is offered by every edition.

To implement in-house, I highly recommend a good training on the product with IBM or another company based in the US. Generally companies who know Informix are passionate about that product with deep knowledge and experience on it.

I do not have figures for my company since we work with final customers. Nevertheless, a number of customers had comparative studies with the direct competition and decided immediately to stay with Informix. Although these figures were confidential, they explained that the DBA staffing figures left no chance to any competitor, the costs of instability were insignificant, and the product does not have high levels of hardware requirement. Also, many embedded functionalities of the engine allow for significant savings on complex developments and maintenance.

The free edition can be enough to handle moderate-size implementations, but you may want a pay for edition to benefit from more functionality, such as replication.

I tested: 

• Windows based systems, such as FoxBase, but they were too limited.
• Oracle and PL/SQL were too expensive for my budget, extremely complex to implement, and had very limited development possibilities.

With Informix + Informix-4GL, I found exactly what I wanted for my projects.

Some customers have decided to leave Informix and sourly regretted this decision after the first severe issues appeared. Many of them came back to Informix.

Take a real look at Informix before making any choice. The competition may look appetizing but unsuspecting issues will probably occur after making the wrong choice, such as unbudgeted increases of your DBA team, decrease of reliability, and increase of complexity to implement similar solutions.

In terms of functionality, not a lot is needed. The product has a lot of very good, useful functionality.

Not looking at Informix would really mean a shot in your own leg before walking a long distance. This reflects my opinion and the vast majority of my customers'.

• High performance on OTLP environment, but depends on application design.
• Data compression for enterprise version with data deduplication.
• Provides solutions for making data highly available, with data replication configuration (HDR, RS, and SD) and ER (Enterprise Replication) for different scenarios.
• The Informix Flexible Grid eliminates the administrative complexity of ER. Flexible Grid provides the ability to automatically create database objects, such as tables, indexes, and stored procedures on all nodes within the grid as a single operation.

Link: http://waiug.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-Nov-waiug-ER-Grid.pdf

Initially, we had an ER configuration, then we moved to an HDR. In both cases, it allowed us to recover from a failure in the main server.

On the part of our development area, a feature that has another product with the SQL clause update from with several INNER JOIN.

To require an example, you confirm to send it.

I've used this solution for eight years approximately. When I took over as a DBA, we were with version 9 (named Informix Workgroup version).

No. So far, it has responded very well

No. We switched from licensing to enterprise because we grew in users and required more memory.

We are growing in data and it is easy to increase the storage space (DB spaces and chunks).

10 out of 10.

We had another platform which was centralized (nine years ago). Currently, the transactions are online.

The initial setup was done for the partner Informix, I would say half & half (half straightforward, half complex) because you must know certain commands of the operating system where it will be installed.

I have not managed the costs, but depending on the characteristics they wish to exploit and the number of users connected, they can opt for connection-based or server-based licensing if there are about 300 users evaluating license per server.

Informix Innovator-C Edition - Free

• Small and medium-sized enterprises (including replication and some clustering benefits).
• Limited to one core and 2GB of memory.

Informix Advanced Workgroup Edition - Payment

• Small and medium-sized enterprises
• This edition is limited to 16 cores with a maximum of 48GB of memory and does not support clustering features.
• Supports spatial data stores.

Informix Enterprise Edition - Payment

• It allows you to use an unlimited amount of data storage, processors, and memory.
• Informix Ultimate Edition includes cluster functions and IBM Informix Flexible Grid functionality.

Informix Advanced Enterprise Edition - Payment

The product has been available for approximately 19 years, since it is part of the system that the company bought.

The server must have the necessary memory, processing, and storage (depending on available infrastructure) in order to be scalable by users' consumption of resources.

If the bases are large, it is advisable to place them in separate dB spaces. If necessary, indices also separate them.

Have a disaster recovery plan.

Define if the information is critical: a high availability of the same (HDR, RS, and SS).

We use the product for analytics, security, and network processing features.

IBM Informix benefits users with high availability and good integration capabilities.

The platform has valuable features for data virtualization and operations. They have a separate system for analytics as well.

The support team could include local engineers to establish efficient communication. It will help us speed up the escalation process.

We have been using IBM Informix for seven years.

IBM Informix has good stability.

We have around 100 IBM Informix users in our organization. It is a scalable product, and we plan to increase the usage.

The technical support services do not require any improvements.

The initial setup is easy. It takes an hour to complete. The deployment involves assessment and design confirmation. It is deployed on the cloud and requires a team of three engineers to work on the process.

We take help from a consultant for implementation.

The product has reasonable pricing. We purchase its yearly license.

I rate IBM Informix an eight out of ten. I recommend it to customers looking for a solution with complex use cases.

We use this solution to build and maintain databases. It is also used for backing up, restoring, and replicating Informix databases.

This solution has made financial reporting possible by allowing financial people the opportunity to set Informix to "Auto Pilot" so that they can attend other duties.

The most valuable features are its speed and ease of management.

This solution is in need of more current tools.

We use Informix for the database, for replication and for backup. The solution is a repository for our clients' data. I'm the technical engineer manager and we are integrators. 

Replication is the most valuable feature and it's relatively easy to use. We can use both SQL and non-SQL connections in the one database. Informix can support huge quantities of data with less memory and less capacity. We don't need to expand capacity to compute a huge quantity of data.

I'd like to see more functionality in Informix HQ to facilitate the administration of products. It's currently based on the UNIX command line and we don't have a very graphical interface to administer the data. I'd like to see more development in the language we use for developing a third procedure. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is very stable.

The solution can be customized to increase capacity.

The support is very good. If we report a level one incident, support can connect to the machine and resolve the incident remotely without a problem. 

The initial setup is straightforward if you know what's required. It can be installed with 10 command lines. It takes about an hour to install on a new machine. 

Informix is very sturdy, but the problem for us is the marketing action around Informix. IBM doesn't provide the roadmap of the product, at least here in Morocco. There's nowhere we can go to access information about product functionality. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

I act as a consultant to my customers, who use the database for processing data. 

I like the solution's performance and facility. 

I would like to see backups from secondary servers. 

We have been using IBM Informix for five years. 

I have encountered no issues with the stability.

The scalability is very good, there existing a problem-free cluster for around ten months.

Thus far, the technical support has been very good. 

The initial setup is very simple.

It took me around 13 minutes to deploy the solution. 

Two people are sufficient for the deployment. 

I am not aware of the licensing costs or terms. 

I act as a partner.

The security is sufficiently good. 

There are around 2,000 people who are making use of the solution at present. 

I rate IBM Informix as a ten out of ten. 

The solution's stability, performance, enhanced functionality, and replication are all great features.

The solution doesn't include functionality like data anonymization. We have this functionality in other solutions like In SQL and Oracle but not in Informix. IBM has another product for anonymization, called InfoSphere Optim. Some clients want that anonymization in the engine, not in another product. Instead of making it a separate product, they should merge the two, or make anonymization available in this solution as well.

There should be more intelligence surrounding discovering data to be able to automatically create indexes.

I've been using the solution since 1995.

Unfortunately, we don't have local technical support in Morocco. We have only call support; we don't have access to on-site support. We must have someone that's remote try to take action on our machine if there are issues. 

The initial setup was easy.

The pricing is okay because we are able to negotiate costs. However, the solution should make an effort to adjust the pricing so that we can get the same pricing in Morocco as we would get in the United States.

We use all deployment models, including cloud and on-premises.

I'd recommend the solution; I'd rate it nine out of ten.

We develop software that works with Informix.

Every version is faster than the previous.

This solution is fast, easy to administer, supports HDR, and supports grid.

This solution would be improved with offline data export.

I really would love to have a QT plugin.