IIUG Insider (Issue #135) September 2011 Other Issues

Highlights: Continuing Support Offering for Informix versions 7.31, 9.4 and 10

Welcome to the International Informix Users Group (IIUG) Insider! Designed for IIUG members and Informix user group leaders, this publication contains timely and relevant information for the IBM Informix community.

Contents:

• Editorial
• Highlights
  • Continuing Support Offering for Informix versions 7.31, 9.4 and 10
• Conference corner
  • 2012 IIUG Informix Conference San Diego, California
  • Have you registered for IOD 2011 Yet?
• Education
  • IBM Webcasts
• Developer corner
  • New in DeveloperWorks
  • Modernize your Informix 4GL application now with Genero
• Informix news
• Support corner
  • Bypassing Multi-Index Scan
• Informix resources
  • Informix blogs and things
• Calendar of events
• Useful links
• Closing and credits

The IIUG board will have its next meeting at the IOD conference in Las Vegas 22-27 October. The IOD has always been a spectacular event. If you are attending we will be happy to meet you there. I will report from our board meeting and the conference in the October issue.

We are going to have the 2012 IIUG Informix conference in San Diego California. We are all excited about the new location. We hope the new location will attract new attendees. Don't miss our 2012 conference. As always we can assure unmatched content, quality, speakers and networking. Follow our conference corner and stay up to date with our conference news.

Please visit the conference site http://www.iiug.org/conf and stay tuned.

In Israel we are celebrating the Jewish New Year. I hope and believe it will be a great year for Informix and would like to wish you all a happy new year or as we say in Hebrew "Shana Tova".

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor

Launching October 1, 2011 and available through September 30, 2013, IBM is offering the Continuing Support Program for clients running Informix versions 7.31, 9.4 and 10 to receive non-defect assistance. This offering is a continuation of the initial pilot program launched October 1, 2010. This flexible offering provides an affordable option for clients who are not yet ready to upgrade, as it is included with their Subscription and Support renewal. Continuing Support is an alternative to, but not a replacement of, our current Service Extension and Total Content Ownership options. The Continuing Support Program will end September 30, 2013.

Continuing Support provides our clients with access to pre-existing and available fixes and is designed to keep our clients running on Informix software until they are able to upgrade to the current version of Informix.

For detailed information to share with your clients, please visit the Informix Continuing Support briefing. If you have any questions, please contact your sales rep or send an email to askIFMX@us.ibm.com.

Technote: http://bit.ly/ContinuingSupportTech

Pradeep Kutty
Sr. Manager - WW Informix, Data Warehouse and Analytics Support
IBM Information Management Division

Call for Speakers - Submit a proposal to present at the 2012 International Informix Users Group (IIUG) Conference.

The IIUG Conference Planning Committee is ready to accept presentation proposals for the 2012 IIUG Conference which is to be held April 22 - 25, 2012 at the San Diego (CA) Marriott Mission Valley, USA.

Do you have experience with Informix or Informix related products? Do you have real-case studies related to Informix solutions? Have you discovered any Informix hints or tips? Are you interested in sharing your Informix knowledge and skills with the Informix User community? If the answer is yes to any of these questions the IIUG CPC invites you to submit a proposal to speak at the 2012 Conference.

The 2012 Conference will be comprised of more than 80 technical/user sessions, a series of hands-on-labs and 1 day of comprehensive tutorials intended to reinforce the power of Informix. Presentation proposals should be brief, but more than 250 words, highlighting the Informix technical solutions, real world experiences or trade tips you will include in your presentation. Multiple presentations are encouraged.

If sharing your knowledge is not enough, conference speakers (non IBM employees) are provided with a complimentary pass providing access to conference sessions, meals and conference related networking events. Use http://www.iiug.org/conf/speakers to register your proposal. The deadline for submitting 2012 IIUG Conference proposals is November 1, 2011. For your convenience, speaker logins have been retained for those who submitted a 2011 IIUG Conference proposal. Don't delay - submit your proposal and biography today for consideration.

See you in San Diego!

The 2012 IIUG Informix Conference Team
www.iiug.org/conf
conference@iiug.org

Hurry up - Just a few moreweeks left to go.

The 2011 IOD conference has a lot in store for the Informix user with many exclusive sessions focused around Informix. Here is a select list of session that (with the session ID's) which would be of interest to you during the conference:

IM Informix and Tools Informix Application Development

• IDS-1546 Keynote - Smarter Data Management with IBMInformix
• IDS-3782 Birds of a Feather - Informix ApplicationDevelopment
• IDS-3784 Ask the Experts - Developing InformixApplications - Everything You Need to Know

IM Informix and Tools Informix for Energy Utilities Industry

• IDS-1546 Keynote - Smarter Data Management with IBM Informix
• IDS-3780 Birds of a Feather - Enabling TimeSeries. Spatial, and Geodetic Applications with Informix

IM Informix and Tools Informix General

• IDS-1546 Keynote - Smarter Data Management with IBM Informix (Jerry Keesee presentation)

IM Informix and Tools Informix Warehouse

• IDS-3779 : Birds of a Feather - Building Data Warehouses with Informix
• IDS-3785 : Ask The Experts - Achieving Faster Business Intelligence with Informix Warehouse and Cognos

Registration for IOD 2011 today: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/2011-conference.

IBM Webcast: Data Management for a New Generation with IBM Informix & Exclusive Informix Offer!

Date: Oct 4, 2011
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM (Eastern Time)
Hosted By: Kristine Enes (IBM)
Presented By: Tom Rieger (IBM), Scott Whalen (IBM)

This session is designed for new and pre-existing version users to learn about why Informix still is the best solution from the most mundane of data needs all the way to your largest of systems. We will show examples where Informix is better than any other technology when you combine all of the capabilities around:

• 'Always on' with dynamic reconfiguration, self tuning and the most flexible replication in the industry. This is about 100%uptime.
• 'Always smart' with the ability to bring a large number of users into a database to ask the hard questions around data warehousing and analytical processing. Hundreds of concurrent users wanting Google like response times.
• 'Always flexible' as Informix is the only enterprise database that can run and replicate between operating systems, tiers, versions and geographies. It can grab and return resources ondemand for your worst case scenarios.
• 'Always fast' for transactional, warehousing and mixed environments. Do your users now expect those queries that took minutes before to run in seconds? Are you looking to bring your corporate data to more and more users - both inside and outside your organization? Oracle cannot do this. Microsoft doesn't know how. Teradata falls apart with too many concurrent users.
• OH - did we mention you can do all this for a fraction of the cost? License cost, hardware cost, people costs. We know your accountants care about that.

Featuring live Q&A with: Tom Rieger & Scott Whalen, IBM Informix SWAT Team Leaders.

Join us to learn about how you can take advantage of a limited time exclusive Informix offer!!

Register today: http://bit.ly/mPKJFE

The 'Always Smart' Database & Exclusive Informix Offer!

Date: Oct 11, 2011
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM (Eastern Time)
Hosted By: Kristine Enes (IBM)
Presented By: Tom Rieger (IBM), Scott Whalen (IBM)

Terms like 'data warehousing', 'star schema' and 'OLAP' have been around for 20 years. Through that time, you would think it would have become easier and cheaper for organizations to get to where they want. Add space this session is designed to be a deeper discussion around the capabilities IBM brings to market around data warehousing and analytics. This session will discuss the need to:

• Scale concurrent user counts into the 100s or 1000s (maybe this is how technical people represent but I just think writing the values hundreds or thousands looks more proper...I'm crazy though so...)
• Manage a mixed workload - that need for transactional application users? and those 'ugly' queries to coexist and not effect each other's performance.
• Google-like performance with your data. People do not want to wait for minutes or hours any longer.
• Lowest total cost. Enable all this with the lowest required investment for hardware with "Always On"software requiring little to no attention.

Oracle cannot do this. Microsoft doesn't know how. Teradata falls apart after many concurrent users.

Featuring live Q&A with: Tom Rieger & Scott Whalen, IBM Informix SWAT Team Leaders.

Join us to learn about how you can take advantage of a limited time exclusive Informix offer!!

Register today: http://bit.ly/pkMQnL

Informix Warehouse Accelerator: Create a data mart
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/lp/demos/summary/im-iwacreatedatamart.html
Learn how to use the administration interface to create a data mart definition, validate the data mart structure, deploy the data mart, and load data into the data mart.

07 Sep 2011

Informix Warehouse Accelerator: Explore the accelerator interface
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/lp/demos/summary/im-iwaexploreinterface.html
Become familiar with IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer Studio, the Eclipse-based administration interface for Informix Warehouse Accelerator. Learn how the different views and menus are used to interact with Informix Warehouse Accelerator.

07 Sep 2011

For more information go to DeveloperWorks - Informix: http://www.iiug.org/url/devworks.html

Your IBM Informix 4GL applications are fundamental to your business, but they need modernizing now. How? They are too important to disrupt, too costly to rewrite, and packaged applications simply don't cut it. The answer is simple - Genero. With Genero, your application can be modernized quickly, at low cost and no risk.

By modernizing your applications with Genero you will:

• Run existing applications on the desktop, web or smartphone concurrently
• Save time on needless re-development by preserving your existing code
• Protect tens of man years of investment in domain specific development
• Protect your domain knowledge resources and competitive edge
• Be ready to adapt applications rapidly to changing market needs and business models (mobile, SaaS etc...)
• Give users the state-of-the-art user interface they deserve
• Improve developer productivity
• Run apps indifferently between Unix, Linux, iMac or Windows without recompilation

See how easy it is by watching this short hands-on webinar demonstrating the modernization of the Informix Stores demo.

For more information contact us here: http://www.4js.com/en/contact

Four Js Development Tools

PR

IBM Offers Database Solution to Enable Smart Meter DataCapture
Utility companies are expanding on their efforts to develop the smart grid through the use of smart meters. IBM suggests that to realize the full potential in smart meters, utility companies and their partners must leverage a data management solution that is designed specifically to reduce data load times, improve query performance and decrease thestorage capacity needs for time series data http://bit.ly/IBMSMA

MDM offers scalability to 100 million smart meters
http://www.metering.com/MDM/offers/scalability/100/million/smart/meters

IBM claims new performance benchmark in smart meter data management
http://bit.ly/nfmVMV

Case Study

An Informix success story
Böckmann Fahrzeugwerke Achieves 20 percent increase in productivity working with Adaptris and using Informix Genero. Read the complete story here http://bit.ly/InfCSBF

McLEOD RUSSEL INDIA LIMITED: Eliminating downtime in the tea trade with IBM Informix
http://bit.ly/ICSMRI

New Informix Video

Have you seen the new Informix video about Informix TimeSeries for Smart Meters? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0sqYyG7Jqk

Informix Benchmark Report

IBM Offers Database Solution to Enable Smart Meter Data Capture

Informix introduced several data warehousing features to its query processing operation in recent past. One of these warehousing features is Multi-Index Scan. A search path based on an access method that uses more than one index on the same table is called a multi-index scan.

Queries in earlier version of Informix typically use no more than one index to scan each table for qualifying rows. With multi-index scan feature the query optimizer can combine one or multiple B-tree indexes and the Boolean operations in the WHERE clause to fetch qualifying data rows. It provides better performance than full-table scans, both for OLTP queries and for data warehousing applications that query large tables. Now you can create up to sixteen indexes on a table and optimizer can search all indexes.

By default, the multi-index scan feature is enabled. However, in certain situation you may need to turn off multi-index scan feature; for example:

• Comparing performance between other access methods
• Unsatisfactory query performance while optimizer choosing MULTI INDEX PATH query path automatically

You can try one of following to turn off multi-index scan feature:

• Use the +AVOID_MULTI_INDEX directive at query level.
• Use **Undocumented** configuration parameter MULTI_INDEX_SCAN, set it to 0 in Informix configuration file to turn off system wide.

Please contact Informix Technical Support for additional assistance to resolve any issues with multi-index scan.

Sanjit Chakraborty

• The IIUG forums at http://www.iiug.org/forums/technical.php **** these are very good****
• Blogs, Videos, News and more at http://planetids.com *** Up to date feeds from many blogs ***
• Informix On Campus http://informixoncampus.blogspot.com/2011/06/faculty-from-regional-universities-at.html *** New ***
• ognjen.orel http://ifmx.wordpress.com *** New ***
• Keshava Murthy https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/Keshav
• Louis T.Cherian http://louistcherian.wordpress.com/ *** New ***
• Art Kagel's blog http://informix-myview.blogspot.com/
• Andrew Ford's blog http://www.informix-dba.blogspot.com/
• Mark Jamison at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/gbowerman
• Jacques Roy at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/jacquesroy
• Kate Dawson at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/katedawson
• Fernando Nunes at http://informix-technology.blogspot.com/
• Eric Vercelletto at http://www.levillageinformix.blogspot.com/ (in French)
• Mark Scranton at http://markscranton.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/informix-and-marketing/
• IBM DATABASE MAGAZINE at http://www.ibmdatabasemag.com
• The Informix Zone at http://www.informix-zone.com
• There is an Informix group on LinkedIn. The group is called "Informix Supporter", so anyone loving Informix can join, from current IBM employees, former Informix employees, to users. It will also be a good occasion to get in touch with others or long-time-no-seen friends. If you fancy showing the Informix logo on your profile, join. To join, simply go to http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/25049/5E4B2048E558.

http://www.iiug.org/quicklinks.html

The International Informix Users Group (IIUG) is an organization designed to enhance communications between its worldwide user community and IBM. The IIUG's membership database now exceeds 25,000 entries and enjoys the support and commitment of IBM's Data Management division. Key programs include local user groups and special interest groups, which we promote and assist from launch through growth.

For comments, please send an email to gary@iiug.org.