dpg@busch.UUCP (David Grossman) (07/23/84)
[] We have been using the Informix DBMS under BSD 4.1 on a VAX 750 since January of this year. Our development project is a large business application for the wholesale beer industry with subsystems such as order entry, accounts pay/receivable, sales, general ledger, inventory, and more. Almost all of our applications are written in C, which can easily manipulate the database. As a side note, most of the programmers here knew nothing about either UN*X or C when the project started, but productivity has been high. About the DBMS, files can be unlimited length, records are limited to 2048 bytes, each record can have a practical limit of 100 fields. I say practical because programs can only reference 100 fields at a time without some fanci- ness. Field lengths are fixed, but it is quite easy to change file schemas without having to modify programs that do not reference the affected fields. The system is fairly fast. With reasonable record locking (we have the Bass locking system call) benchmarks give about 30 records added or updated per cpu second. This performance is severely degraded without locking system calls. There is a report writer (Ace) and query language (Informer), but these are fairly simple. Our package will probably make minimal use of them, with perhaps only 20% of all reports written in Ace. The most powerful tool we have used in creating screens is the `curses' library. Some really neat stuff can be done with this. There are some bugs and problems with security and transaction logging, but we have been very satisfied with this product. For more info, contact myself, or the manufacturer: Relational Database Systems, Inc. 2471 Bayshore Rd, Suite 600 Palo Alto, CA 94303 415/424-1300 Good luck, David Grossman ..!ihnp4!we53!busch!dpg Anheuser-Busch, Inc. 314/577-3125 One Busch Place, Bldg. 202-4 St. Louis, MO 63118