The Informix DBMS developed from the pioneering Ingres system that also led to Sybase and SQL Server. For a time in the 1990s Informix was the second most popular database system, after Oracle. 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.
Table of contents |
2 Innovative Software acquisition 3 Version 7 4 Illustra acquisition 5 Corporate misgovernance 6 Misgovernance indictments 7 Product summary |
Sippl and King left Cromenco to found Relational Database Systems (RDS) in 1980. Their first product, Marathon, could be seen as a 16-bit version of their earlier ISAM work, released on Onyx, a version of Unix for early ZiLOG microprocessors.
At RDS, they 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:
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.
Now known as Informix OnLine Dynamic Server (after briefing entertaining the name Obsidian), 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 performance benchmarks. As a result of its success, Informix vaulted to the #2 position in the database world by 1997, pushing Sybase out of that spot with surprising ease.
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, an abbreviation for eXtended Multi-Processing. This effort focused on enhancements in data warehousing and parallelism in a shared-nothing platform environment such as IBM's RS-6000/SP.
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, ported to the new architecture after partnerships with Illustra. This left other vendors scrambling, with Oracle introducing a "grafted on" package for time-series support in 1997, and Sybase turning to a third party for an external package.
Starting in the year 2000, the major events in Informix's history no longer centered on its technical innovations. That year, in March, Informix acquired Ardent Software, a company that had a history of mergers and acquisitions of its own. That acquisition added multi-dimensional engines UniVerse and UniData (known collectively as U2) to its already-numerous list of database engines at the time, which included not only the Informix heritage products, but a datawarehouse-oriented SQL engine from Red Brick and the 100% Java version of SQL, Cloudscape (which came to be bundled with the reference implementation of J2EE).
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.
Another Informix officer, the company's Vice-President in charge of European operations Walter K�nigseder, was indicted by a federal grand jury earlier but as a citizen and resident of Munich, Germany, the United States has been unable to secure his extradition.