How does the DBMS affect application performance? And Informix GUI tools?

Question

I use Informix DBMS in all my web applications. My question has two parts:

1. Does the DBMS have a big effect on the performance of my applications and if the answer is yes what about Informix and `MS SQL Server in this issue?

2. I want some GUI tools to facilitate my job when writing queries, creating database, relationships, ERD, etc. The Informix client is so bad. There are no facilities at all. I want some tools like SQL Server Management Studio

Answer 1

As a GUI tool for Informix you can use Aqua Data Studio from Aquafold. It also supports MS SQL Server.

As of the performance: it depends. How well is your Database design. Do you use indexes, is your query well-written, etc. etc. Very hard to answer your question, we just don't know enough.

Answer 2

To design a solution that would perform the best, one needs to know the nature of the application you are building. For example, if you are building a system that needs to process and compute large volume of data and computations can be distributed, a "traditional" relational database is not a good option no matter what vendor you choose. You would be better off with an option that supports sharding, Hadoop and will likely be based on some kind of NoSQL solution.

If you are sticking with RDMS and building something that has a lot of reads and not a lot of writes, go for a database that supports Snapshot Isolation which will allow your readers to not be blocked by writers.

Cost also plays into this - some RDMS systems are free, some are not. Your question is way to general to be answered specifically.