Claiming a two-year lead over rivals, Informix Software Inc, Menlo Park, California, last week consummated its plan to acquire Illustra Technologies Inc, detailing an object-relational Universal Server database it will ship by the end of the year. Informix says Universal Server will store and manage relational tables, text, numbers, sound, images and Web pages. Effectively, it’s a new release of Informix’s existing Dynamic Scalable Architecture relational database technology, tailored to support DataBlade modules – the Illustra technology that enables all kinds of structured and unstructured multimedia data types to be stored as true objects in existing databases, and not just as parcels of data with object wrappers a la Oracle Corp. Next quarter, the company will offer a gateway enabling customers to build applications on the Illustra Server object-oriented database that can access information stored in Informix databases. At the same time it will introduce a development tool kit for building DataBlade programs that will run against both the Illustra server and Universal Server. A subsequent release of the tool kit will provide support for building C++ DataBlade class library modules using Informix tools. The plan is to migrate all Illustra customers, applications and DataBlades to Universal Server over time. Illustra plans one further release of the Illustra Server, version 3.3, in July, but says that it will continue to support 3.x releases as long as customers require it. Universal Server won’t support all Illustra 3.3 features until a subsequent release later in 1997. The company says Informix customers will be able to run their existing applications unchanged on Universal Server – which its engineers call Universal Data Server 1.0 internally. The acquisition of Illustra is set for completion by the end of the month.
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