Better performance
- User-defined routines are optimized.
When you put your custom routines in the database server, the query optimizer can calculate when to run them during queries.
- Indexes increase query speed.
Indexes, created with secondary access methods, can efficiently find and compare values. Secondary access methods build and manipulate index structures on data. With your Informix® database server, you can create indexes on data that cannot be sorted in a standard relational database. You can implement your data as extended data types and create functional indexes to speed sorting. A functional index sorts information about the data, instead of the data itself.
For example, if your data is images, you can index features of the images. Then, when you run a query to match an image, the index runs much faster than comparing the binary files of each image.
- Network traffic is reduced.
When you use user-defined routines and other extensibility features, you perform more processing on the data within the database server. Therefore, you send less data to the client application.