The April issue of the IBM Database Magazine contains an interesting article written by Andrew Ford - senior DBA at Network IP - about how to write a small benchmark in Python that puts some heavy load on the database engine:

IBM Database Magazine: Writing a Simple Informix Engine Benchmark in Python

It would be enlightening to run this benchmark on the same machine against an IDS and a DB2 instance to see how well each of them handles this OLTP like workload with the same amount of hardware resources available :-)

You can learn more about Python and InformixDB module written by Carsten Haese here:

• Connecting the Informix community and the Python community
• Talking with Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby to IDS