The release of Informix 12.10.xC2 on September 13, 2013 has some great new features leading off with support for JSON and BSON types natively in the server along with collections. This native support comes with both typeless indexes, supported by mongo, and traditional SQL typed indexes, along with comparison function, distributed query, sharding, transaction support, stored procedures, support for automatic compression of collection data along with many other features that you would expect an enterprise class database would possess.
In addition to the JSON & BSON data types, compatibility with MongoDB client side drivers, which include C, C++, C#, Java, Phython, Erlang, Perl, Ruby and several others, was a key part of this release. This means an existing application using the mongo drivers can be pointed to Informix Database Server and operate with little or no modifications. Programmers can also utilize any of the existing mongo drivers to program new applications against the Informix database server.
While many people have the need for JSON support they also have a need for traditional SQL support, especially transactional support. People want to ensure they can remove inventory and create the proper invoices ensuring this work happens as a single unit (transaction support). Inside the Informix Database Server this is not a problem, you can access collections together with standard SQL tables inside a single transaction. In addition you can encapsulate business logic inside stored procedures which operate on both JSON collection and SQL tables at the same time. One of the most exciting capabilities is the ability to join collections to SQL tables and collection to other collections while utilizing the indexes created on the SQL tables and collections. The DBA and/or programmer no longer have to decide upfront if it is better to use a system only of collections or a system only of SQL tables, but rather have a single database in which the programmer decides a if collection is optimal or a SQL table is optimal.
To enhance new users out of the box experience, the Informix Server has removed the fix size system and opted for an auto-tuning out of the box system. The installation asks if you want a small, medium, large or extra large system, which directly relates to the amount of resources consumed on the host computer. The newly installed instance will automatically adapt to the computer resources and do run time self-tuning of buffer, recovery logs, disk space and many other database and operating system resources.
The Informix OpenAdmin Tool (aka OAT) has been enhanced to allow users to monitor the collections along with all their other database objects, thus providing a seamless way of monitoring your NoSQL data along with you traditional SQL data.