I'm hoping tomorrow to sign off on the second to last nail in the coffin for Informix at work (I swear it will not die!).  I won't know for sure until 3:35 am or so, but I'm confident.  Its' a nightly job that gets data from our application into an Oracle database that supplies data for a bunch of other apps that we don't really work on (hope to get them all moved to SQL Server eventually though).  Something odd was happening with the database last night so I couldn't sign off today (discovered some issues with file system access on the production task server that needed to be fixed anyway) but we are good to go now (touch wood).

When all is said and done, I guess I will kind of miss Informix.  You know, in the kind of way you would miss using flat files or foxpro.  Maybe even the way you would look back on a root canal.  It was very painful, but I'll sure never forget it.  I'm not sure but even with the files gzipped in SQL Server the database is pushing a terabyte of binary data, and it had gotten so big that an archiving solution had to be developed, so it must have been at least that on Informix.  I used to always think it was a terrible idea to store files in the database, but the prospect of storing those millions of files in the file system has made me reconsider.  Only problem is that this was directly in the OLTP database so it was really slowing things down.  Splitting this off into its' own database was the real key to making the app perform better IMO (though cleaning up some of the old VB6 code and moving logic into a stored procedures and a managed core library certainly didn't hurt either).

Once this is done, we will officially not be supporting any jobs that need Informix to run.  There will still be reports coming from an outside source that need to get their data from Informix (via an incredibly shaky replication setup), but when there are problems with those, 99% of the time it comes down to replication (which one of the guys on our extended team knows like the back of his hand so they are not usually *too* painful.  Well, certainly less painful than the locking and corruption issues we were getting with Informix.  Though if you asked him about replication I'm sure he would think differently about the too painful part

As painful as its' been I guess the project has pretty much been a great success.  All of the jobs that we wrote in .net have been incredibly stable , thanks in large part to a great fantastic core library one of my co-workers wrote.  Some of the threading and database access stuff he wrote, I honestly can't go without anymore.  Even if it only saves 5 or 6 (or 20 in the case of the threading stuff!), it does it often enough, and with solid enough results, that I start missing the library big time when its' not available.  We're already start to work on some really cool ideas for upgrading the application, and that part is going to be really fun too. 

I guess its' been a pretty cool few weeks.  Its' amazing how much different things look when you have time to sit and think about what's been happening!