DA Morgan said:

Yes, you'd clearly be much better off with a highly scalable, easy to
implement solution like Oracle RAC.

Well that's not  true, is it?  Informix does already have powerful, viable,
proven technology for High-Availability (Informix HDR for example).  However
it is true to say that this solution is not yet, in pre-v11 releases,
"distributed" in the way that Oracle RAC is.

I do agree with Daniel's comments that one wouldn't be wanting to look at a
beta version of *any* product for HA required right now.

DA - you missed my point.  I guess that's expected from you since you
have repeatedly demonstrated a rather feeble intellect.

Floyd already mentioned that he knew Cheetah (the previous release) had
a lot of new HA capacity.  Also several folks had already pointed out
links to current white papers. I suggested that he also look at the beta
for the upcoming release because it has a whole bunch of additional HA
functionality and he was asking for information on new IDS HA functionality.

I guess I should be so hard on you Dan - after all I'm kind and gentle
to dumb animals.  Also you have given me the opportunity to mention the
Cheetah2 open beta again.

For anyone that is interested, the site to join the Cheetah2 open beta
is at http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ids/open-beta.html

Can you explain us why?...
Oh... and do not forget the OP motivation... High availability...

Thanks.

This brief rant would be sad if you even had an inkling about what you  
are writing about.  If I didn't actually suspect that you were a shill
for IBM IMS rather than for the fat O, I wouldn't bother to respond.  
Even so, I normally don't.

First, you are correct, as currently released IDS does not have all of
the functionality of Oracle's RAC.  Personally I don't see that as any
loss as I don't see clusters as any kind of HA solution at all.  If
something takes out my data center RAC is not going to save the
business.  At best cluster failover is a PART of an HA solution and the
only useful thing that RAC provides on top of that is some load
balancing possibly less expensive capacity upgrade.  Though if the thing
actually scaled well that part would work SO much better.

However, putting all of that aside, as Madison said, check out the IDS
Cheetah2 Beta on that front.  IDS doesn't make coffee either, something
far more important and close to my heart than RAC!  But then it's not
meant to make coffee.  What it does provide, with HDR, ER, SDSS, and RSS
- the whole MACH11 suite - is a comprehensive set of solutions to
provide TRUE HA and not just high availability but constant availability
and infinitely configurable and dynamic load balancing.  And IDS does
this BETTER than any alternative technology.  Cheetah2 extends that as,
likely, will Cheetah3 when it comes along.

Now, Morgan, please, lose the address of this newsgroup.

Art S. Kagel
Oninit

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