IBM Informix Reviews

IBM Informix is a central database solution across various environments, supporting multiple applications and business intelligence tools.

The key areas for improvement revolve around understanding the current customer trends and demands, particularly in software and database requirements. The product's performance could be better compared to Oracle.

I use IBM Informix for education purposes of myself. To test those capabilities, especially locking and concurrency issues. From time to time, some customer of mine wants me to help with, for example, performance tuning or something like that. In the Czech Republic, IBM Informix is not a very widely used database. But there are people who need it at this scale.

Informix is similar to Microsoft SQL Server due to locking facilities. Language is a bit different, but it is simpler than that of Oracle. So, this is a very robust database server that can run in very parallel mode. It is suitable for large-scale database processing. Since I am a developer, I don't directly profit from this database system's capabilities. My work is to make programs for other customers. So my profit is indirect.

I am a consultant.

Replication, all levels of replication, query charting, and the MongoDB embedded are the most valuable features of this solution.

It is extremely resilient and cannot be compared to anyone else on the market.

We primarily use the solution to store some customer information in our database. Basically, this customer information will be used by all the applications that are in our company.

The solution is quite stable and reliable. We use it mainly due to its general stable nature.

There's a lot of flexibility for us to create a DB schema. 

They provide some replication for us - XDR, or something like that.  

So far, we do not have a lot of issues. It's pretty problem-free. 

My primary use case for IBM Informix is for case application.

When I tried to make a connection, I started with the driver. I'm not sure in terms of IO, because we're experiencing the bad performance. So, I'm not sure if it's the database or the operating system.

Moreover, I have had difficulty finding skilled workers. There is room for improvement in terms of performance and ease of use.

We are an integrator and we implement solutions for several kinds of customers. My largest customer is a paper mill but we also have SMB customers that deal in other industries including telecommunications, government, and others. They need accounting solutions and other types of implementations

I have used this product for several of my customers.

This is a feature-rich product.

There is almost zero maintenance required.

We are using Informix in Brazil for mapping two company emails. We are using it here in Rio De Janeiro and also in Sierra. The main system of Informix in Rio is the commercial system and is very important to the company. The technical system using Informix is in Sierra. However, in Rio, it is now more important as the commercial system is being used by the call center which is using the Informix database.

There are many great features within the solution. For myself, from what I have witnessed, there isn't just one valuable feature.

I'm overall quite satisfied with this solution. I have 20 years with Informix. I like everything about it.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The stability is very, very good.

The scalability of the solution is great.

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.