Comment by CrLf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CrLf | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions Informix, which has also been an IBM product for a number of years now. That makes it at least five major RDBMS code bases inside IBM.

I spent a few years managing DB2 instances at a previous employer and I've seen it hold its own against mixed workloads (i.e. shitstorms of bad-behaved applications and people running ad-hoc queries) that I don't think even a well tuned PostgreSQL could handle today.

DB2 has some really annoying quirks(1) and that IBM'ish feel that's very hard to explain, but it's also very understandable (from a tuning perspective) for such a complex piece of software.

DB2 for Windows seemed mostly crap compared to Linux or AIX, though.

(1) For example, at least since I've last looked into it, DB2 had no decent MVCC(2) and it was a real pain to deal with all the lock-related problems that would arise from large write/update transactions running in parallel with small reads.

(2) At some point (9.5, IIRC) they tried to simulate MVCC by letting transactions read previous row versions from the transaction log. This seemed to come with its own set of significant drawbacks.

I interviewed with Informix shortly before IBM acquired it, and after they acquired Illustra (a commercialized Postgres, company started by Stonebraker). My recollection was that Informix was a mess having decided to basically build their next major version on the untested Illustra. Different locations, lots of politics, two massive codebases. I remember thinking that Informix shot themselves in the head, and that IBM then acquired them cheap.

That brings back memories. I was involved in trying to build webapps on Illustra in the mid/late 90s. We (a small dev shop) ended up with it because it was sold to our non-technical manager on the basis that it was the future for the web and it was ridiculously expensive for the kind of bottom-feeder projects we were doing - which was kind of galling given we were being paid peanuts.

But even I was initially excited - the feature list looked cool - multimedia, rich/extensible data types (called blades?), OO/table inheritance, built-in dynamic web page generation, etc. But the performance was absolutely terrible and all the advanced features turned out to be less than useful or slightly broken. I remember my disapointment when I first tried out the "search for images LIKE a reference image" feature and it matched a butterfly with a racing car. We struggled for a few months with the general flakiness and horrible performance of Illustra and eventually convinced them to allow us to use Informix instead and went back to storing images as files served by HTTP and using PHP or Perl for the dynamic HTML generation. The Informix sales dudes seemed convinced that Illustra was the future.

The performance was much better but for the web apps we were writing, we could have just stuck with mSQL or MySQl and saved a lot of time and effort.

multimedia, rich/extensible data types (called blades?)

Yeah, DataBlades. I too was burned by them in the 90s.

It became a mess as Phil White ran the place into the ground.

Sadly, he never would have been brought in but for the financial disaster that was Informix's acquisition of Innovative Software; the resulting financial stress necessitated "new upper management with Wall Street credibility". Hence came Phil White and his minions, and the rest is a sad history.

Informix is a pretty great database. Much like you mentioned with DB2, it can take really varied workloads on the same database and keep on trucking. Just requires some basic indexing, no need to carefully tune to a particular use case.

The best part is how resource light it is. I was using Informix on a dual 200mhz HP K class box until about 8 years ago. HP literally just gave us a RP3440 to get us off it...

I've only done one real project on Informix but I really enjoyed it. The Informix culture is great, all the DBAs seem to be former C programmers who happily write their own utilities in C where other DBAs would have used Perl or something.

Two of IBM/Informix's top engineering guys started at Informix itself in the 1980s and are still there now with IBM; one even left Google to return. I worked with both for years.

There's a little-known link between Informix and DB2.

Back in '86, DB2 lacked a mechanism to run ad hoc SQL from a file. They had SPUFI for terminal use but apparently nothing you could just wrap in JCL and fire off.

Informix developed a product called Batch/SPUFI to do exactly that, along with porting their Ace report writer to use on DB2.

We got it working, but the company abandoned the entire mainframe product line soon thereafter.

How is Informix doing?

Last time I used it, it was still an independent company and in all these years I thought it was gone.

It's been an IBM property for 15 years.

That I know.

Question was about how it was doing on the market, given that I never saw it again deployed.

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