From: Eric Scott
Subject: Any opinions about Ibex Itasca ODBMS?
Date: 
Message-ID: <EOpJ4.2650$PV.178245@bgtnsc06-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>
I'm seriously considering Itasca as an object database. Judging from
marketing material, feature-wise, it looks damn-near perfect, especially
since CLOS/Common Lisp is my language of choice.

What I'm not yet clear on are the things that don't show up in
white papers and marketing material:

    How responsive is the tech support?

    How badly will I need responsive tech support?

    Is the windows NT version a good port from the original Unix
version (It's certainly a lot cheaper)?

    How happy are Lisp programmers with it?

    How strong is the community of Itasca users?

    Stuff like that.

Anyone out there have experience with Ibex Itasca?

Thanks.

Greetings from San Diego,

- Eric Scott

From: akmal
Subject: Re: Any opinions about Ibex Itasca ODBMS?
Date: 
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.1000414100514.7757B-100000@vega.soi.city.ac.uk>
On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, Eric Scott wrote:

> Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 20:08:04 GMT
> From: Eric Scott <·········@worldnet.att.net>
> Newsgroups: comp.databases.object, comp.lang.lisp
> Subject: Any opinions about Ibex Itasca ODBMS?
> 
> I'm seriously considering Itasca as an object database. Judging from
> marketing material, feature-wise, it looks damn-near perfect, especially
> since CLOS/Common Lisp is my language of choice.

I believe from a feature point of view, it has been highly rated. I recall
seeing Doug Barry's lists published in various journals many years ago.

> 
> What I'm not yet clear on are the things that don't show up in
> white papers and marketing material:
> 
>     How responsive is the tech support?
> 
>     How badly will I need responsive tech support?
> 
>     Is the windows NT version a good port from the original Unix
> version (It's certainly a lot cheaper)?
> 
>     How happy are Lisp programmers with it?
> 
>     How strong is the community of Itasca users?
> 
>     Stuff like that.
> 
> Anyone out there have experience with Ibex Itasca?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Greetings from San Diego,
> 
> - Eric Scott
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

I can only say that in my experince I have found very few users of this
product. There are a few that I do know of in Europe (shipbuilders in
Denmark, a financial institution in Switzerland I think). 

It is hard to comment on the product now, but there is an old evaluation
here:

T.J. Halloran (1993) Performance measurement of three commercial
object-oriented database management systems. Master's Thesis,
AFIT/GCS/ENG/93D-12, US Air Force Institute of Technology, December 1993.
[ Results for Itasca, M.A.T.I.S.S.E. and ObjectStore ]

Note that Halloran used the C++ API and found it lacking in a number of
areas. The product also suffered some quality problems. But, as mentioned
above, that was a while ago. I've not found any other evaluations of this
product.

HTH

akmal
From: ·······@dr.lucent.com David Chazin
Subject: Re: Any opinions about Ibex Itasca ODBMS?
Date: 
Message-ID: <8d7l81$d9p@nntpa.cb.lucent.com>
If you are programming in LISP, Itasca is probably a good choice. My experience is
six years old, but I worked in a lab with someone who develooped an extremely
sophisticated AI based CAD system on top of it. As far as tech support goes, you
will definitely need it if you are doing serious development. 
 
David Chazin
-- 
David Chazin