That brings back memories. I was involved in trying to build webapps on Illustra in the mid/late 90s. We (a small dev shop) ended up with it because it was so

That brings back memories. I was involved in trying to build webapps on Illustra in the mid/late 90s. We (a small dev shop) ended up with it because it was sold to our non-technical manager on the basis that it was the future for the web and it was ridiculously expensive for the kind of bottom-feeder projects we were doing - which was kind of galling given we were being paid peanuts. But even I was initially excited - the feature list looked cool - multimedia, rich/extensible data types (called blades?), OO/table inheritance, built-in dynamic web page generation, etc. But the performance was absolutely terrible and all the advanced features turned out to be less than useful or slightly broken. I remember my disapointment when I first tried out the "search for images LIKE a reference image" feature and it matched a butterfly with a racing car. We struggled for a few months with the general flakiness and horrible performance of Illustra and eventually convinced them to allow us to use Informix instead and went back to storing images as files served by HTTP and using PHP or Perl for the dynamic HTML generation. The Informix sales dudes seemed convinced that Illustra was the future. The performance was much better but for the web apps we were writing, we could have just stuck with mSQL or MySQl and saved a lot of time and effort.