Informix
The term Informix refers to a relational database, and for almost 20 years also referred to the company which developed it.The Informix DBMS developed from the pioneering Ingres system that also led to Sybase and SQL Server. For a time in the 1990s Informix became the second most popular database system (behind the Oracle database. Success did not last very long, however, and by 2000 a series of management blunders had all but destroyed the company. In 2001 IBM purchased Informix in order to gain access to its existing market share and customer base. Long-term plans to merge Informix technology with DB2 have emerged, since the Informix Arrowhead project has now become the DB2 Arrowhead. IBM has also undertaken to support older versions.
Roger Sippl and Laura King worked at Cromenco, an early S-100/CP/M company, where they developed a small relational database based on ISAM techniques, as a part of a report-writer software package.
Convinced of the usefulness of the database market, and that they needed larger machines to make it practical, Sippl and King left Cromenco to found Relational Database Systems in 1980. Their first product, Marathon, essentially represented a 16-bit version of their earlier ISAM work hosted on Unix.
They then turned their attention to the emerging SQL market, and adapted a version of the publicly-available Ingres source code to the Unix platform. At the time Ingres had a number of serious limitations, using page-level locking, relying on the underlying operating system to provide all security, and limiting names to only 18 characters. In addition Ingres used its own query language QUEL, at a time when SQL had started to become a clear winner in the database marketplace.
Nevertheless Ingres offered a well-tested and free product, allowing them to release their own version as Informix in 1981. Informix included only the most basic changes to the Ingres system, most notably an adaptation of QUEL to their own Informer language. In 1984 they published a major upgrade to Informix with a new SQL-based query engine, although their format for SQL remained "odd" compared to the rest of the market.
Through the early 1980s Informix remained a small player, but as Unix grew in popularity during the mid-1980s, their fortunes changed. By 1986 they had become large enough to float a successful IPO, and changed the company name to Informix Software. A series of releases followed, including the splitting of the product line starting with Version 5 into Informix OnLine with a new query engine (known for a time as Turbo), and Informix-SE, a re-named version of the original system.
Following the lead of a number of other database developers, Informix then started looking at tools to build database applications. Informix-4GL was the result, a text-based forms application.
In 1988 they purchased Innovative Software, makers of a groundbreaking spreadsheet program on the Apple Macintosh, releasing it as Informix Wingz. Wingz provided a highly graphical user interface, supported very large spreadsheets, and offered programming in a HyperCard-like language known as HyperScript. The original release on the Mac proved very successful, quickly becoming the #2 spreadhseet behind Microsoft Excel, which it generally beat in all technical ways. Ports of WingZ then appeared for a number of other platforms, mostly Unix variants. However it suffered from a serious lack of development and marketing resources, likely due to NIH and a general misunderstanding of the non-server software market. By the early 1990s WingZ had become uncompetitive, and Informix eventually sold it off in 1995 after it disappeared from the market.
In 1994, as part of a collaboration with Sequent Computer Systems, Informix released the first Version 7.x release. This involved a major rework of the core engine of the product, supporting both horizontal and vertical parallelism, and based on a multi-threaded core well suited towards the Symmetric Multi-Processing systems that Sequent pioneered and that major vendors like Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard would eventually follow up on. The two forms of parallelism made the product capable of market-leading levels of scalability, both for OLTP and data warehousing.
Now known as Informix OnLine Dynamic Server, Version 7 hit the market in 1994, just when SMP systems were becoming popular and Unix in general had started to become the server operating system of choice. In addition, Version 7 consistently won almost every benchmarking award. Largely as a result, Informix vaulted to the #2 position in the database world by 1997, pushing Sybase out of that spot with surprising ease. Sybase responded by claiming they would provide a new server with many of the same features, but this still hasn't happened. From a technical standpoint, Informix remains arguably still the most advanced relational database available.
Building on the success of Version 7, Informix made the fateful decision to split its core database development investment into two efforts. One effort, which became the Version 8 product line, came also to be known as XPS. This effort focused on enhancements in data warehousing and parallelism in a shared-nothing platform environment such as IBM's RS-6000/SP.
The second focus, which followed the 1995 purchase of Illustra, concentrated on object-relational database (O-R) technology. Illustra, written by ex-Postgres team members, included various features that allowed it to return fully-formed objects directly from the database, a feature that can significantly reduce programming time in many projects. Illustra also included a feature known as DataBlades that allowed new data types and features to be included in the basic server as options. These included solutions to a number of thorny SQL problems, namely time series, spatial and multimedia data. Informix integrated Illustra's O-R mapping and DataBlades into the main OnLine product, resulting in Informix Universal Server, or more generally Version 9.
Both new versions, V8 and V9, appeared on the market in 1996, making Informix the first of the "big three" database companies (along with Oracle and Sybase) to offer built-in O-R support. Commentators paid particular attention to the DataBlades, which soon became very popular: dozens appearing within a year. This left other vendors scrambling, with Oracle introducing a "grafted on" package for time-series support in 1997, and Sybase instead turning to a third party for an external package.
But ongoing failures in marketing and an unfortunate leadership in corporate misgovernance overshadowed Informix's technical successes. On April 1, 1997, Informix had to announce that revenues fall short of expectations by $100 million. In retrospect, the day before this incident probably marked the peak of Informix's success as a company. While it continued to advance its technology, the churn in management that followed the ouster of the CEO in 1997 meant the company never recovered the momentum that its success with Version 7.x established.
Starting in the year 2000, the major events in Informix's history no longer centred on its technical innovations. By that time the database engines included not only the Informix heritage products, but SQL engines from Red Brick and Cloudscape, and the multi-dimensional engines UniVerse and UniData (known collectively as U2).
That year, in March, Informix acquired Ardent Software, a company that had a history of mergers and acquisitions of its own. By July the former CEO of Ardent became the CEO of Informix, and soon re-organized Informix to make it more attractive as a acquisition target. The major step taken was to separate out all of the database engine technologies from the applications and tools.
In 2001 IBM took advantage of this reorganization, and bought from Informix the database technology, the Informix brand itself, and the over 100,000-customer base associated with these. The application and tool leftovers remained under the name Ascential Software.
Prior to its purchase, Informix had several interesting products that it developed or acquired, including:
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