INFORMIX - To rise like a Phoenix

I normally hate it to duplicate information but this message is really worth it:

IDS license revenue for 2006 grew over 30% !!!

This is fantastic.

The Informix Zone says thank you to the excellent Informix Engineers, the outstanding Informix Support, the clever Informix Sales Team and all other Informix supporters at IBM who made this possible due to their faithful dedication to the product.

Thank you all and keep up the excellent work in 2007 - The comeback is already happening in an impressive way.

However it is not that surprising if you take a deeper look at the outstanding IDS technology in comparison with Oracle or DB2. Just to quote two Informix administrators:

• 
  IDS rocks for heavy OLTP compared to SQL Server and DB2.
  

— Darko Krstic, Nova Banka, Bosnia and Herzegovina

• 
  Great database. Best one we have and we have Oracle and DB2.
  

— Gerry Sturkenboom, Livestock Improvement

• 
  The greatest challenge is to keep up with all the Oracle bugs and patch fixes. Even the current version of 10gR2 that we are on has a large number of bugs and issues. Keeping on top of these is a big challenge, considering that we have over 100 databases.
  
  -- Oracle DBA working in a large government agency

Those administrators do not trust the marketing claims about TCO and manageability of databases. They worked with Oracle and DB2 and they know what makes IDS so unique.

Their opinions seems to be shared by many more database professionals. Just let's take a review of a recent poll done at The Informix Zone:

IBM DB2 (Linux/Unix/Windows) is:

• a superior alternative to IDS (3 %)
• a passable alternative to IDS (2 %)
• will not be able to replace IDS (61 %)
• is a non-starter (35%)

A clear result. Nearly nobody really believes that DB2 is a valid alternative to IDS or would ever be able to replace IDS.

You might say that this is not representative. Maybe, but take a look at the excellent study Development Tools in 2006 done by IIUG board member Jean Georges Perrin among 4GL developers:

As you can see DB2 is on the last place (18.9%) regarding the question Which databases are you considering ?.

Ok, maybe also not representative or ?

Anyway, it doesn't matter because

is back !!