Informix

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

In April 2017, IBM delegated active development and support to HCL Technologies for 15 years, with a number of IBM employees working on Informix also moving to HCL. As part of this arrangement IBM will continue to market and sell it as IBM Informix to their customers, with HCLTech able to market and sell it as HCL Informix.

The current version of Informix is 14.10 and 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 improve its support for data warehouse workloads. Through extensions, Informix supports data types that are not a part of the SQL standard.

On July 24, 2020, HCL announced OneDB Database Server V1.0.0.0 as a multi-model (relational, object-relational, and dimensional) DBMS based on Informix. On August 19, 2021 HCL released OneDB 2.0 as a cloud native, multi-cloud, Kubernetes-orchestrated offering.

On December 29, 2021, Actian (formerly Ingres Corporation) became fully owned by HCL America. Actian remained a separate entity, now acting as the Data, Analytics and Insights division of HCLSoftware. It is expected that the Informix portfolio will be transferred from HCL to Actian, with HCL Informix and OneDB already available for download at Actian's Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) portal.

Key products
As of 2023, the current version of both IBM and HCL Informix is 14.10. 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.

Informix version 14.10 introduced support for partial indexing where only a subset of the rows in a table are indexed and for multi-valued key indexes which support indexing the elements within multi-valued data types such as LIST, SET, MULTISET, and BSON array fields.

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.

IBM 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 used to be an advanced data warehouse edition, including the Informix Warehouse Accelerator (IWA), but it was deprecated in favor of the Advanced Enterprise Edition (which give entitlement rights to IWA).

Regarding HCL Informix, there is a single commercial version available, which is compatible with the IBM Informix Advanced Enterprise Edition, also having rights to IWA. There is also a trial version available, with no known limits, except for an expiration date.

HCL Informix 14.10 key highlights include:
 * Functional parity with IBM Informix 14.10 for on-premises deployment
 * Replacement of FlexNet license management with a script-based monitoring solution, consistent with other Actian offerings
 * Expanded O/S support with the addition of Linux on Power Little Endian and Solaris Sparc.

Positioning
Informix is generally considered to be optimized for environments with very low or no database administration, including use as an embedded database. It has a long track record of supporting very high transaction rates and providing uptime characteristics needed for mission critical applications such as manufacturing lines and reservation systems. Informix has been widely deployed in the retail sector, where the low administration overhead makes it useful for in-store deployments.

With the ability to deeply embed Informix in gateways and routers, timeseries support, small footprint, and low administration requirements, Informix is also targeted at Internet-of-Things solutions, where many of the data-handling requirements can be handled with gateways that embed Informix and connect sensors and devices to the internet.

Other products
In addition to the products based on the version 14.1 engine the Informix family also includes a number of legacy database products which are still supported in market. These include Informix OnLine, Informix Standard Edition (SE), and Informix C-ISAM. These products are simpler and smaller footprint database engines that are also frequently embedded in third party applications. Collectively these products are often referred to as the "Informix Classics".

The Informix family also includes: Obsolete and non-IBM Informix heritage products can run via emulation on modern hardware.
 * Informix Client-SDK: a client-side development environment which supports a number of different environments including .net for Windows developers and a variety of protocols for Unix and Linux environments.
 * Informix-4GL: a fourth generation language for application programming development.
 * Informix Warehouse Accelerator (IWA): an in-memory database based on IBM BLU acceleration technology, 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. IWA can be installed on the same computer as the Informix database server or another one. It receives copies of data from the database server and organizes it into data marts.
 * Informix Enterprise Gateway: it connects the Informix environment with that of any shared-library ODBC Level 2-compliant driver manager and driver on UNIX or Linux. Enterprise Gateway allows Informix database application developers and users to access information on DB2, Oracle, Sybase and other non-Informix databases as easily and transparently as if they were accessing an Informix database server.

Training and certification
IBM Training includes a complete set of core Data Servers Training courses that apply to Informix. These courses delve into many essential Informix concepts, from fundamentals to advanced SQL topics.

As part of IBM's Academic Initiative, IBM is offering Informix software, documentation and training to higher education institutions worldwide through its new Informix on Campus program. IBM is offering an inclusive package of Informix materials to college faculty called "Informix In a Box", which offers hands-on labs and PowerPoints to use in lessons, recorded training for teachers, DVDs with class material and VMware virtual appliance images, as well as T-shirts for students.

Users groups
Users groups remain active in Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, the United States, and many other countries. The IIUG (International Informix Users Group) acts as a federation of those user groups and provides numerous services to its members.