Martin,

You bring up several very valid points, and I commend you for taking
the time to write more than one or two sentences.

I think there can be an assumption of who is installing the software,
it's not going to be done by my grandmother, it's going to be done
by somebody who actually took the installation media, put it on a
system, and installed it, with _some_ knowledge that they will have
to first install, then adjust settings. That doesn't mean that you
have to be an experienced DBA just to install it, to wit, look at
how MySQL, Sybase, Oracle, and others make some reasonable assumptions
to bootstrap the software into a usable, runnable state.

What might be a useful compromise is to leave the standard installation
alone, and instead, write an "Informix Advisor" program that would allow
you to inspect the system _after_ the installation, and make recommendations
on settings. This might be more achievable in several aspects, which I'll
explain.

First, if IBM creates a standard installation without all kinds of selections
it allows a standard baseline installation that everyone can work from. As it
is right now, it's workable, and IDS will come up. But we all know it has to
be tuned after the installation. You might find more of a community effort
rolled into an 'advisor' program, that could have some basic core components,
and allow plugins for different platforms. It could allow a lot of community
input, and allow IBM to retain some kind of hands-off 'purity' that doesn't
taint the adjustments. In other words, IBM provides the baseline, the community
would provide the advisor. By IBM keeping a hands-off role, as they basically
are right now, it allows you the experienced or inexperienced DBA the opportunity
to tune based on a wide variety of tunings. For you, you might not need the
advisor program/script, but for a budding DBA it will get them into the groove
a lot faster, and help to make Informix run better, which translates into a
more positive customer and developer experience.

As usual I could be completely off-base. But I would love to see a real
open source tool that could work to help solve IDS problems based on solid
metrics and experience. My own budding experience with IDS was quite
intimidating, and I would have loved to have had some kind of advisor program
or tool that would have guided me in the right direction. To this day, some
of the settings are _still_ vague, and require an advanced perspective of
the engine.

-t-


Martin Fuerderer wrote:
>
> Looking at this (and similar issues) from a different angle ...:
>
> As a professional at work (in my profession that is) I want control.
> And many options, parameters, etc. provide a lot of control (assuming
> they work . That is control for the professional who knows what he
> is doing. Ideally the stuff works somehow automatically-magically with
> some default settings, so it would work for those that "do not
> (exactly) know what they are doing". But I would not expect that it
> works optimally for my needs. And there's nothing more annoying than
> some "system" (often software) that "thinks" it knows better than
> myself what I want. Such behaviour really puts me off!
>
> A database system like IDS is a very complex system. Why is there
> the expectation that such systems should work optimally in all sorts
> of disparate scenarios?
>
> Nobody expects that the average passenger can fly a Boing 767 in a
> safe way. There's tangible hardware, and generally wide acceptance
> that "touching earth the wrong way" is a disaster.
>
> But with highly complex software systems? People expect an
> out-of-the-box installation on any chosen hardware in any chosen
> infrastructure, and of course it should scale very well for 1 user
> just developing something up to thousands of users running complex
> queries. And, please, all this without having to configure anything.
>
> My guess is, such expectations prevail because there is no tangible
> hardware. Nothing to really see ... so it must be easy.
> But I'm sure there must be a more profound way to explain this
> interesting phenomen that again and again astonishes me since many
> years.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
> --
> Martin Fuerderer
> IBM Informix Development Munich, Germany
> Information Management
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