Claiming a two-year lead over rivals, Informix Software Inc has consummated its plan to acquire Illustra Technologies Inc (CI No 2,820), detailing an object-relational Universal Server database it’ll ship by year-end. Informix says Universal Server will store and manage relational tables, text, numbers, sound, images and Web pages. It’s effectively a new cut of Informix’s existing Dynamic Scalable Architecture relational database technology tailored to support DataBlade modules, the Illustra technology which allows 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 allowing customers to build applications on the Illustra Server object- oriented database that can access information stored in Informix databases. At the same time it’ll introduce a development toolkit for building DataBlade programs that will run against both the Illustra server and Universal Server. A subsequent release of the toolkit 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 it’ll continue to support 3.x releases as long as customers require. 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 on Universal Server – which its engineers call Universal Data Server 1.0 internally – unchanged. The acquisition of Illustra is set to complete by the end of the month.
