Artifact Details

Title

Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) workshop : Informix

Catalog Number

102702566

Type

Document

Description

The founders and principal pioneers at Informix described the history of the company and the development of its products and markets. The key focus was to support Unix platform computers with a high performance, easy to use relational database management systems product. Once they were established in this niche they then faced competition from the other RDBMS vendors who each promoted different aspects of their products. Informix principally marketed through VARs so there was always local support for their clients. Benchmarks became a significant competitive element in responding to RFPs, but a lot of these were just could you check the item as being covered rather than how well that function performed. Although they preferred their own query and reporting language, they were forced to switch to SQL in order to be competitive and they were able to exploit a relationship with SAP which did not want to be locked into only interfacing with Oracle. Informix was successful in the distributed database arena and then acquired a number of companies and products including WingZ.

Date

2007-06-12

Contributor

Baxter, Nick, Participant
Harrington, Roy, Participant
Johnson, Luanne, Moderator
MacDonald, Robert, Participant
Mahoney, Michael, Historian
Rawlings, Nicholas, Editor
Sippl, Roger, Participant

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, California

Extent

40 p.

Category

Transcription

Subject

Johnson, Luanne; Actuate; Altos; AT&T; Baxter, Nick; benchmark; C-ISAM; CP/M; Cromemco; distributed database systems; Finocchio, Bob; Harrington, Roy; Informix Corporation; Ingres Corporation; ISAM; King, Laura; McDonald, Robert; Oracle Corporation; relational database system; SAP; Sippl, Roger; SQL; Sully, Dan; Sybase Corporation; UNIX; VARs; White, Phil; Wingz

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Credit

Software Industry Special Interest Group

Lot Number

X4069.2007