IDS Forum

RE: Informix vs postgreSQL

Posted By: John Hoffman
Date: Monday, 25 June 2007, at 1:57 p.m.

In Response To: Informix vs postgreSQL (Franck ABELLI)

I did it and I was very happy with the result.

I had a customer that didn't want to pay for Informix support or upgrades.
We ran Informix on SCO for about 12 years. During that time we upgraded the
database server from Informix SE to OnLine 5 to IDS 2000 9.21. Finally after
years of typically running an out of date database server on an out of date
operating system, I decided to migrate to PostgreSQL on Linux. The migration
was only marginally more difficult than upgrading Informix engines and
skipping several major releases as described above. If my memory serves me
correctly, the only real challenge was datetime data types. With Informix
you can declare the scale of a datetime (ex. datetime(hour to minute) or
datetime(month to hour)), you cannot do this with PostgreSQL. It's important
to note that there are many features in Informix that may not be present in
PostgreSQL.

My experience with performance and response times are subjective because I
did not do any real before and after benchmarking (I just timed a few
significant queries) and I also did a major hardware upgrade as part of the
process. I went from a 1GHZ Pentium 3 with several 10000 RPM SCSI disks (no
RAID) to a 4.3 GHZ Pentium 4 with a 15000 RPM SCSI RAID 10 array.
Performance and response times were dramatically improved. It's probably
worth mentioning that the database is currently just over 41 GB and
typically has between 30 and 40 simultaneous users. As for availability,
it's solid as a rock. I have been running this database with PostgreSQL /
Aubit4gl / Linux for about 2 1/2 years.

On a side note, I also had about 100000 lines of 4gl code to migrate as
well. I tried Aubit4gl and was pleasantly surprised. As you might expect,
there were several minor problems, but (unexpectedly) there were no major
problems.

In summary, if money were not an issue, I would have stayed with Informix.
While I personally haven't done any benchmarking, I am sure that on
equivalent hardware Informix out performs PostgreSQL (probably by a
significant margin). Availability would be tough to improve on. My
experience is that Informix on SCO and PostgreSQL on Linux are both
extremely reliable. Informix is also more feature rich than PostgreSQL.
However, in this particular case, I found PostgreSQL / Aubit4gl / Linux to
be a very suitable replacement for Informix on SCO.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ids-bounces@iiug.org [mailto:ids-bounces@iiug.org]On Behalf Of
> Franck ABELLI
> Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 3:40 AM
> To: ids@iiug.org
> Subject: Informix vs postgreSQL [9421]
>
>
> hi,
>
> does anyone have successfully migrated from informix to postgresql ?
>
> what is your feedback concerning the migration task?
> what about the performances, availability, response times in postgresql
> compared to informix ?
>
> thanks for any feedback
>
>
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> *************
> Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum.
>
>

Messages In This Thread

• Informix vs postgreSQL
  Franck ABELLI -- Friday, 22 June 2007, at 3:39 a.m.
  • Re: Informix vs postgreSQL
    Obnoxio The Clown -- Monday, 25 June 2007, at 6:11 a.m.
    • Re: Informix vs postgreSQL
      Jairo Gubler -- Monday, 25 June 2007, at 10:44 a.m.
  • Re: Informix vs postgreSQL *NM*
    Adam Tauno Williams -- Monday, 25 June 2007, at 8:30 a.m.
  • RE: Informix vs postgreSQL
    John Hoffman -- Monday, 25 June 2007, at 1:57 p.m.

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