Hi all,

We are doing an exercise of migrating an application (developed in
Informix 4gl) from Informix to Oracle database.
Before doing actual migration, we would like to know some of the key
advantages of Oracle over Informix. If there are any examples of any
company getting benefits because of this kind of migration, please
reply me such kind of case studies.

Please reply to my email id.

Thanks and Regards,
Girish.

Unless you intend to make use of Oracle provided features that are not
available with Informix there are for all practical purposes no
advantages of Oracle over Informix.

Having said that Oracle is a very good all around rdbms that works well
with small to large concurrent user loads with small to very large
physical databases in OLTP, DSS, or Warehouse environments.  Oracle
supports most all of the ANSI 92 syntax.  It comes complete with a wide
range of single row functions including the ANSI trim, nullif, and
coalesce.  Date format manipulation and date math in Oracle is very
nice and fairly simple: to_date, to_char, add_months, last_day.

Oracle 10g includes the ability to recover dropped objects, show a
history of changes to a row, and flash a table back to a point in time
for querying.  Many routine maintenance tasks can be performed while
the data is still available for update activity.

HTH -- Mark D Powell --

To leverage Oracle's examples you will need to rewrite your code
to use what is Oracle but not Informix.

To start with reads don't block writes and writes don't block
reads. Then there is a huge base of functionality available in the
many built-in packages. And it goes on from there. I have a 3 hour
lecture on the topic that barely scratches the surface.

Take a look at interMedia.
Take a look at ADDM.
Take a look at locally managed tablespaces.
Take a look at undo.
Take a look at how log files work.
Take a look at the analytic functions.

But most of all get a copy of Tom Kyte's book "Expert one-on-one Oracle"
and in the first three chapters substitute the name "Informix" every
time you read "SQL Server."

If you contact me off-line I can put you in touch with someone in a
company that, several years ago, did what you are about to do.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damor...@x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)