Informix Corp’s acquisition of object/relational database company Illustra Technologies Inc at the beginning of the year for a massive $450m (CI No 2,820) led to much debate about whether or not Illustra’s DataBlade technology could successfully be merged with Informix’s. This week, at the company’s user conference in Paris, Informix chief technical officer Michael Stonebraker admitted that there were problems with the merged product, Universal Server, which on September 30th began shipping as a developer release to customers and partners. Stonebraker told Computergram that adding C or C++ routines to the database engine itself for customization purposes, could cause a total crash if the code was faulty. The Universal Server has been part of Informix’s grand plan since the Illustra merger, and Informix has set 70 programmers working to merge its relational database Online Dynamic Server with Illustra’s object/relational database, with the holy grail being the ability to store graphics, audio, video and other file formats alongside text and numerals. The architecture will require Illustra’s DataBlades to be meshed into the database kernel itself. Each blade handles a particular file format – audio, video, graphics, for instance. The problem arises when a particular user needs to customize the database: treating all months as the same length for financial reasons, for instance. In this case a routine must be written to adjust the engine’s parameters. If the routine is written in C or C++, any crash would shut down the entire server. The routine could be written in Java, which would mean that crashes would be restricted to the Java address space, i.e. the client. But Stonebraker admits that this would slow things right down, saying customers going down this road must be prepared to, take a performance hit. But even if Informix’s ambitious merge of two quite different technologies proves to have been a pipedream after all, Stonebraker is convinced it was the only way to go, and says it is the competition that is making all the wrong moves: No-one is going to do it like Oracle, no-one. With their middleware approach they use Corba to change a definition, and Corba has to check against every record in the database. So you need 10,000 instructions to call a 10 line C routine. Performance will decrease by an order of magnitude of three. Meanwhile Oracle’s founder Larry Ellison has been equally complimentary, saying earlier this year that Informix’s merge of the Illustra and Informix technology is, technically impossible and absurd. Informix still maintains Universal Server will ship by December 30 at the very latest, despite the skepticism of some analysts.
