Talk:IBM Informix

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Contents 1 Comments 2 Logo 3 Redbrick 4 Literary Content 5 Legal History

[edit] Comments

Comments originally placed inside the article body

(I don't believe Roger Sippl was ever an employee of Cromemco. Or, if he had been, that he produced the product while he was their employee. I believe he was a consultant hired by Cromemco to develop the report-writer package noted above. It was written in a dialect of BASIC that I created for Cromemco--also on a contract basis--that included a "KSAM" package and BASIC statements to do rudimentary operations--insert, retrieve, update, etc.--on the pseudo-database. I vaguely recall talking to a woman at Roger's office, so that was probably Laura King. The KSAM package--Keyed Sequential Access Method--was in turn produced by another small company, I believe from Oakland, California.  ::William F. Wilkinson)

(The claim that Informix's code originated with Ingres is puzzling and not readily substantiated. There is certainly no concrete evidence of that in any code, even in Informix 3.30 code, which dates back to 1985 and therefore would be closest to the claimed Ingres base. It is indisputable that Sybase was the base for MS SQL Server; it is not clear that Sybase was based on Ingres code either - though the Wikepedia page for Sybase also claims this. Ingres may have had some influence on Informix, but Ingres query processing was radically different from that used in Informix - using multiple processes rather than a single process, and using Quel rather than Informer, both of which are arguably better than SQL from the same period.)

(The claim of 1981 for the first release of Informix is early - the Ingres page claims it was 1984, which is probably more accurate than 1981. Another important product was C-ISAM - available separately. It was used as the storage manager for Informix (and still is used as the storage manager for Informix-SE), so it most likely pre-dates Informix. There was also a product called File-It!, complete with exclamation mark, that was essentially a cut-down, one-table at a time, version of Informix or Informix-SQL. This existed as an adjunct to ISQL 1.10 and 2.00; there is evidence that it also existed as an adjunct to Informix 3.30.)

[edit] Logo

I've replaced the animated logo with a non-animated version. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-01-28 00:16Z

[edit] Redbrick

Didn't Informix buy Redbrick (Data warehousing systems)? When IBM purchased Informix, they got Redbrick as well (you can still find Redbrick on the IBM pages).

[edit] Literary Content

The section entitled "2005: The Final Chapter of the Informix Story" reads more like a newspaper article than an encyclopedia entry. The section gives some opinionated statements in a sensationalist fashion, and a lot of "shoulds" where a factual article should contain sentences worded in a more definition, factual manner.

The claim that IBM bought Informix at WalMart's suggestion doesn't ring true. While there is a footnote for it, the footnote doesn't include a quote, only an assertion.

Yes, Informix *did* buy Redbrick, which had been a independent company located in Los Gatos for about 10 years. The transaction closed in 2000 I think, under John Yves Dexmier, CEO.

No, Informix is not based on Ingres, but Illustra, was loosely based on Postgres both of which were projects of Dr. Michael Stonebreaker at UC Berkeley that went on to be spun out as companies.

This is a good article as far as it goes but doesn't really cover the last few years of the company. Informix had 3 CEOs after Phil, and their contributions are not really called out.

[edit] Legal History

As with the missing CEOs, there is no mention in this article of the intellectual property dispute between IBM and Informix that became moot when IBM purchased Informix. Factual information such as filing dates and a summary of pleadings would make a useful addition. A summary of the settlement terms, if any, would also be interesting. 207.193.132.159 (talk) 17:24, 9 May 2008 (UTC) druebenson