IBM Informix

IBM Informix

Developer(s)	IBM
Stable release	IBM Informix 12.10.xC7 / June 15, 2016 (2016-06-15)
Development status	Active
Written in	C, C++, assembly
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	RDBMS
License	Proprietary EULA
Website	Official IBM website

IBM Informix is a product family within IBM's Information Management division that is centered on several relational database management system (RDBMS) offerings. The Informix products were originally developed by Informix Corporation, whose Informix Software subsidiary was acquired by IBM in 2001.

IBM has continued active development and marketing of the key Informix products, the current version of which (12.10) forms the basis of several product editions with variation in capacity and functionality. The Informix database has been used in many high transaction rate OLTP applications in the retail, finance, energy and utilities, manufacturing and transportation sectors. More recently the server has been enhanced to support data warehouse workloads.

The Informix server supports the object-relational model, which has permitted IBM to offer extensions that support data types that are not a part of the SQL standard. The most widely used of these are the time series and spatial extensions, which provide both data type support and language extensions that permit high performance domain specific queries and efficient storage for datasets based on time series and spatial data.

The current version of IBM Informix is 12.10. It was code-named "Centaurus" during development. The major enhancements made over previous releases were adding built-in index compression, integration of JSON collections with support for MongoDB JSON drivers into the server, and an enhancement permitting database objects to be partitioned across multiple servers in a cluster or grid (aka sharding). Queries can optionally return data from the locally connected server instance or from an entire grid with the same SQL.

Heterogeneous clusters are fully supported, and there are several deployment options that are available, including some that provide very high levels of data redundancy and fault tolerance. This feature is marketed by IBM as Informix Flexible Grid.

Informix is offered in a number of editions, including free developer editions, editions for small and mid-sized business, and editions supporting the complete feature set and designed to be used in support of the largest enterprise applications.

There is also an advanced data warehouse edition of Informix. This version includes the Informix Warehouse Accelerator which uses a combination of newer technologies including in-memory data, tokenization, deep compression, and columnar database technology to provide extreme high performance on business intelligence and data warehouse style queries.