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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DOLLAR BILL who wrote (511)	4/27/1998 9:55:00 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Respond to of 5853

I expect IFMX to surprise this week like most on the thread. (But then, I bought stock in AirOne.) The concensus estimate is a loss of four cents. Informix popped a point last quarter when it beat estimates. It looks like the H&Q conference will be neutralized by the downdraft in the market. I like IFMX as a long term play on the growth of the internet and the observation that people (i.e. companies) are pack rats. They will store increasing amounts of digital data. Informix has superior technology in my opinion and a great CEO in Robert Finocchio. Here's a recent post: BYTE magazine seems to have an article every month on database software. Last month's (April, page 91) issue had an article, titled "Betting on ORDBMS" by Michael Stonebraker, Informix CTO on Object-Relational Database Management Systems (ORDBMS) in line-of-business applications. The current (May, page 81) issue has an article on parallel databases and parallel-processing by Ken Rudin (e-mail krudin@emergent.com) , CEO and co-founder of Emergent Corporation titled "When Parallel Lines Meet". The article dives into the details of sequential query execution versus query partitioning, shared-everything versus shared-disk versus shared-nothing multiprocessor architectures, and shared-disk versus shared-nothing database architectures." Is your head spinning yet? By the way,"Oracle follows the shared-disk architecture, whereas most other database vendors such as IBM, Informix, Sybase, and Teradata follow the shared-nothing architecture." The details are more than enough to toast Rusty's miniature mind. But I think the trends and the reasons we are all on this thread are obvious once again. "Databases today start out as gigabyte babies and rapidly grow to terabyte toddlers. Feeding their growth are trends including: the rush to build data warehouses that consolidate all your corporate data, the desire to put ever more information on-line for access by Internet or intranet, data mining solutions that require access to detailed transaction-level data, and the corporate longing to track every interaction with customers. And the data itself is expanding to include documents, pictures, video, and anything else that exists in digital form." Sounds like he has Informix in mind. "Large and rapidly growing databases strain the abilities of traditional hardware platforms. Just storing all this data will stress most existing platforms. But an even more serious problem is the ability to query these mountains of data in a reasonable amount of time. Traditional single-processor machines don't have the raw number-crunching power to sift through these large and growing databases efficiently." "If your database is strategic, sooner or later it will scale up to a size that only multiprocessor platforms - such as SMP, lustering, MPP, and NUMA architectures - can handle." I think the major trends reveal that if you hold Informix shares over the next three to five years . . . you will be handsomely rewarded regardless of any quarterly earnings report. Of course I'd love to see a nickel or better next week like everyone else!