Rather than wait for its own development to bear fruit, Informix Corp, Menlo Park is buying its way onto the Internet, agreeing to buy object database house Illustra Information Technologies Inc just before Christmas for 12.9m new shares, at the time valuing the Oakland, California company at some $387m. Three-year-old Illustra has yet to turn a profit, so its venture capital backers have cause to cheer: they put up only $10m for the 200-employee firm. The attraction is Illustra’s technology for including multimedia objects in existing databases. Informix plans to use it to create a Universal Server object-relational database by year-end, believing it will put it up to two years ahead of rivals. The database will store and manage Web pages, text, images, video, sound, spatial data, financial tools and other unstructured multimedia data types as true objects, not just parcels of data with object wrappers a la Oracle Corp. Illustra will remain a separate entity and take over all Informix object database work, including the Extensible Framework and Server on which it was working. The pair claims Universal Server will be the first commercial database combining scalable transaction processing, analytical processing and extensibility. It is expected to take nine months to integrate Illustra’s DataBlade technology with Informix Dynamic Scalable Architecture. Both databases will support the emerging object-relational SQL 3 standard so those writing to interim products can be sure their applications will work with the merged one. There will be a single application programming interface to both products.
