IIUG Insider (Issue #55) January 2005

Highlights: IIUG news, IIUG Conference, XPS 8.5, II, Derby & More…

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.

Editorial…
IIUG – The Board
IIUG – IIUG Informix Yellow Pages Program and IIUG Sponsorship Program Update
IIUG – The Board’s in the Keys!
IIUG Conference – Latest News on the Greatest Education Event of the Year…
Sponsored Event – Supercharge Your Informix Database with the CopperEye DataBlade
Event – Benelux’ next meeting (Brussels, Belgium)
Event – IBM Information Management 2005 Conference (Vienna, Austria)
Event – Global WebSphere Community Meeting Calendar
Breaking News – IBM Offers Free Access to Selected DB Patents
Product News – DB2 Information Integrator is now WebSphere Information Integrator
Product News – XPS 8.50.UC1 is now GA!
Service Offerings – Software Acquisition and Channels (SWAC) lead generation program
Service Offerings – 5 Minute Briefing
Developer Corner – Develop Apache Derby applications in Eclipse, from DeveloperWorks
Useful Links
Closing and Credits

Editorial…

Welcome to 2005! On behalf of the board, I wanted to be the last one to send our best wishes for 2005.

Speaking of wishes, what would we, as Informix users, wish for…

The Death of Oracle? No, I think they’ll manage to do that by themselves. The failure of SQL Server? It runs on Windows, so you first should make sure Windows runs. Anyway, that’s negative and I am not a pessimistic lad.

Here is my wish list…

I wish for a new engine for DBAs, with plenty of new state-of-the-art features.

For developers, I wish for exciting new connectivity products and easier-to-use tools.

For all, I wish for more coverage, advertising, less videos with Stuart (hey I am certainly as cute as he is!), lots of] help for business partners (no, seriously, no one specific in mind).

I also wish for a new editor in chief for the Insider. It has been a real pleasure serving you, chatting with some of you. My work constraints make it difficult to continue working with the Insider on a so-regular basis. I will take that time to work on two other projects (if I have board approval). I would like to thanks friends like Fred for pushing me into the Insider business and Stuart for his natural tolerance and kindness.

During this year, the Insider has become monthly, a little more sarcastic, more impertinent, a little more technical, and open to vendors. Well, a little bit more “French”. This was my goal and I achieved it (you may however not like it). Tell the team about all you wish for (and don’t) at enews@iiug.org. Gary Ben-Israel is going to be the new editor in chief starting in February.

Anyway, in this issue, plenty of news on products, services…

News of our exciting conference in Denver! Be sure to be there, we have high quality speakers with high quality topics! More than 100 proposals for the 40 we needed! Even I was rejected and I am on a waiting list – this is surely a good sign of quality… Thanks again Cindy ;-).

Sincerely, thanks to all for your continuous support! Ce n’est qu’un au revoir…

Jean Georges Perrin
Editor

IIUG – The Board

No, there is absolutely no connection with the “Borg” in Star Trek, however, we have assimilated 3 new people: Kate, David & Carolyn.

The board has a new IBM nominee in the person of Carolyn Woods.

Carolyn Woods joined Informix in 1996 as a services marketing specialist in Informix Customer Services. She managed the worldwide services marketing team at Informix until the acquisition by IBM in 2001. At IBM, Carolyn has had communications and operations roles in the Information Management Customer Support & Services team. After 8 years in the support and services organization, Carolyn left to join the Information Management marketing team in late 2004 as the marketing manager for Informix in SMB and channels. Carolyn lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

2005 board is composed of:

Gary Ben-Israel
Ron M. Flannery
David Fraser
Sam Gentsch
June Hunt
Mark Isepponi
Cindy Lichtenauer
Stuart Litel
Jean Georges Perrin
Mark Scranton
Kate Tomchik
Carlolyn Woods

IIUG – IIUG Informix Yellow Pages Program and IIUG Sponsorship Program Update

These programs were introduced with the last issue of the Insider (December 2004) and, we are pleased to report, they are coming along well. You may have already noticed some changes to the IIUG site related to these new programs. We have moved the site sponsors to the upper right of the main page and have added an icon to access the IIUG Informix Yellow Pages. We have also added several new links under ‘IIUG’.

The IIUG Informix Yellow Pages is a service that allows IIUG members an easy way to find companies that provide Informix-related products and services. The service is available at no charge, and members may search for listings by O/S platform, Informix product base, and/or through the use of keywords to find a specific type of service, geography, and more. We already have 11 products and services listed, representing 8 companies.

If you would like to have your company included in these listings, see /yellowpages for more information and to submit an application. You may also access this area by selecting the new ‘IIUG Informix Yellow Pages Program’ link under ‘IIUG’ from the main page.

The IIUG Sponsorship program is also now in full swing. In addition to IBM, Advanced Data Tools, and Four J’s, our site sponsors, CopperEye and Kazer are already active Gold sponsors. One of our first events was the recent notification of the CopperEye webinar. We have applications from four other companies and will be continuing to add to our sponsors list. Please see /community/sponsors.html to keep up on those companies who are sponsoring the IIUG. You may also find the list by selecting the new ‘IIUG Sponsors’ link under ‘Community’ from the main page.

Along with notification of webinars, you will be getting news about our sponsors with future editions of the Insider. Our Gold sponsors will also be highlighted on the IIUG main page. For more information about the sponsorship program or to submit an application, please see: /sponsor. You may also access this area by selecting the new ‘Sponsor Program’ link under ‘IIUG’ from the main page.

IIUG – The Board’s in the Keys!

The IIUG board is currently having one of its meeting in the Florida Keys. I can hear some of you. These people are having fun under the sun, at the beaches, while we are in damn cold Boston, Strasbourg, London or Seattle.

We have a tough agenda; we have a lot of things we want to achieve in 2005, among them:

Our conference in Denver (CO, USA) associated with IDUG.
Our sponsorship program, which just started (sponsors, there are a limited number of slots, I think there are only 1 or 2 left… hurry!).

Anyway here is a small word from each board member telling about the excitement of all being here to accomplish good work.

Stuart: We are looking to the future for all Informix users worldwide.

Ron: I hope we can accomplish what’s on our agenda efficiently. Oh, and enjoy ourselves too because we’re done early. 🙂

Gary: I am sure we will come up with great ideas. Will we succeed? Let you be the judge of that.

Sam: 2004 ended with a lot of productivity, I am looking forward to taking advantage of that momentum.

Mark Scranton: A tan!

June: I expect we’ll find out what each board member is working on for IIUG, that we’ll discuss what we want to accomplish during 2005, and look ahead to 2006. I also expect that all this will take a lot longer; we’re making good progress. I hope I didn’t just jinx that.

Cindy: I get to sit next to Mark Scranton for 2 days…….Stuart is sick, so he is VERY quiet. 🙂 Seriously, we hope to come up with some great plans for this year!

Kate: I want to give the board another type of customer’s prospective on what we would like from IBM and Informix. I already feel like things are getting accomplished! I would love to see Home Depot and many other companies stay on Informix for many years to come, and this can only be accomplished with some changes in the current strategies.

David: I am here to find out what the strategic direction of IIUG is and how I can participate in it’s growth. My view is to see Informix as still the most successful and exciting database and development environment 10 years from now.

Carolyn: Outside the weather is perfect and the ocean looks so invitingly blue. Still, here we are inside a conference room with only a glimpse of the view outside. As the newest member of the Board, I am impressed by the dedication and commitment of my fellow directors. I hope that our strategies to bolster the success of local user groups and guide the success of upcoming conferences to further empower Informix users worldwide.

Jean Georges: I’m here to meet our new mates and set achievable goals for 2005! I hope you will all be positively surprised.

IIUG Conference – Latest News on the Greatest Education Event of the Year…

Have you checked out what’s going to be offered at the IDUG/IIUG North America Conference 2005?

The IIUG will be sponsoring our own tracks of sessions at the conference which will feature technical Informix content for everyone from beginners to advanced users. We will feature more than 50 Informix sessions over three and a half days. Presentations will cover engines, application development, new technologies and much more.

Here are just a few of the presentations that you can attend:

IDS Internals and Disk Structures
Informix SQL Performance Tuning
Connecting to Informix the Open Source Way
What’s new in JAVA for the Informix Application Developer
Encryption End to End with IDS
WebSphere meets Informix

There are also four half-day educational seminars offered the Sunday before the main conference starts.

For more information about the conference, go to /conf or directly to http://conferences.idug.org/namerica/2005/index.cfm.

REMINDER for those presenting at the IDUG/IIUG North America Conference 2005:

Presentation Drafts are due to be uploaded to the IDUG website by February 3, 2005. Please contact Cindy Lichtenauer (cindy@iiug.org) with any questions.

Event – Benelux’ next meeting (Brussels, Belgium)

The Benelux Informix Users Group is meeting on March 3rd in Brussels, Belgium. I would suggest to rally them to discover their agenda.

They will soon have their web site open, so be sure to check /bnliug from now on…

Contact information: Guy Dillen, Tel. (+32)(0)11 53 77 53, guy.dillen@infotechpartners.be.

Event – IBM Information Management 2005 Conference (Vienna, Austria)

IBM Global Services announced its annual European IBM DB2 Information Management featuring DB2, Business Intelligence, IMS, Content Management, Information Integration and Informix.

It is 09 May to 13 May 2005, in Vienna (Austria).

To learn more, check http://www-306.ibm.com/services/learning/ites.wss?pageType=page&c=a0006122.

Message from IIUG Conference Board: if you plan to go to just one conference in May 2005 or in 2005, double check /conf. Even for Europeans, flying to Denver, CO, USA might be cheaper than flying to Vienna.

Event – Global WebSphere Community Meeting Calendar

This is not a 100% pure Informix event, but more and more of you have asked information about WebSphere and the integration of IDS and WSAS.

The Global WebSphere Community is a worldwide network of WebSphere professionals. Check us out at the local user group meetings: http://www.websphere.org/events.php#ug_mtg.

Breaking News – IBM Offers Free Access to Selected DB Patents

From DBTA 5 MINUTE BRIEFING.

In a nod to the open source community, IBM announced this week that it would make 500 of its software patents freely available to anyone working on open source projects including Linux. Nearly 70 patents relating to database and database technology were included in the donation. “Database and data management patents were the largest component. It was a big donation,” Jeff Jones, director of strategy for IBM DB2 Information Management Software, told 5 Minute Briefing. IBM believes this is the largest pledge ever of patents of any kind and, according to senior IBM officials, the move signals a new beginning in the way that IBM manages its intellectual property.

The announcement came at the same time that the Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office issued its list of recipients of the highest number of patents in 2004. IBM led the list with over 3200 patents, more than 1000 more than the company in second place. In excess of 500 of the patents were awarded to IBM’s software group.

According to Jones, IBM is creating a “patent commons,” in which IBM’s intellectual property can be according to open source rules. The pledge is applicable to any individual, community, or company working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of open source software now or in the future. “We want to foster and accelerate innovation in the open source community,” Jones said. More information is available at http://www-1.ibm.com/press/PressServletForm.wss (do a press room search for “patents”).

Product News – DB2 Information Integrator is now WebSphere Information Integrator

The IBM DB2 Information Integrator software portfolio is being rebranded as IBM WebSphere Information Integrator.

This change was driven by customer feedback to bring together IBM software that focuses on integration across data, content, applications, people and processes. The WebSphere brand offers integration and infrastructure software to maximize business flexibility and responsiveness. The core attributes of integration and openness are also integral to the WebSphere Information Integrator portfolio and its role in providing organizations with real-time, integrated access to disparate and distributed information.

WebSphere Information Integrator V8.2 is the new release of IBM information integration middleware which can help an enterprise become an on demand business. It provides core capabilities needed by business integration and business intelligence applications — including the ability to access diverse and distributed data as if it were a single data source, regardless where it resides.

WebSphere Information Integrator provides a range of integration technologies — enterprise search, data and content federation, data replication, data transformation, and data event publishing — to meet varied integration requirements.

More details at: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/integration/launch.html

Product News – XPS 8.50.UC1 is now GA!

If you haven’t already, now’s the time to check out the new 8.50 release of XPS. You’ll find several fantastic features that simplify DBA processes as well as improve overall performance. A few of the new features include:

The ability to restore tables, or portions of tables, without requiring a complete restore of the database. This finer granularity of restore makes it easier to manage systems and recover from disk, application, or system failures.
Improved ISTAR capabilities allowing distributed transactions with other IDS or XPS systems to be initiated from an XPS system.
Better fragment elimination, providing improved performance, when table fragmentation use one time unit, like DAY, and queries use another time unit, like MONTH.
A MERGE capability that allows users to insert new data and update existing data in one command. This simplifies the management of the database load processes while improving performance.
The ability to have XPS automatically add logical logs as needed when more space is needed.
The ability to specify a dbspace as read-only, allowing simpler and faster backups and faster warm restores. XPS does not perform duplicate backups of these dbspaces and can ignore the logical log recovery phase during warm restore. This enhances performance and improves usability.

And more. The 8.50.UC1 release is currently generally available for electronic or media purchase from passport advantage. Future releases of XPS in 2005 include an 8.50 fixpack version in March and a feature release scheduled for Q4.

Contact: Jim Troisi, XPS development manager/product manager (troisi@us.ibm.com).

Service Offerings – Software Acquisition and Channels (SWAC) lead generation program

An exclusive IBM offer for Business partners.

This is a unique lead generation program that selected Informix partners have used to reach out to SMB customers using IBM tele reps. The team’s mission is to promote partner solutions that include an IBM software component. This showcases the cooperation between IBM and Informix partners and resellers. Areas of coverage are currently US, Canada and Asia Pacific. Please contact William Freiwah at wfreiwah@ca.ibm.com for more information.

Service Offerings – 5 Minute Briefing

5 Minute Briefing: Data Integration is a weekly email newsletter full of everything the data integration professional needs to know each week – new products, new research data points, emerging perspectives and technologies. To subscribe, visit http://www.dbta.com/5_minute_briefing/subscribe.html, or to review the current and past issues of 5 Minute Briefing: Data Integration issues, visit http://www.dbta.com/5_minute_briefing/current.html.

Developer Corner – Develop Apache Derby applications in Eclipse, from DeveloperWorks

This is the featured news from DeveloperWorks this month. Full details:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0501roux/
Discover how the Eclipse-based Apache Derby tools can greatly ease the development process.

You might also consider those other technical articles.

Create Informix tables and indexes more efficiently
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0501fan/
Learn the performance considerations for creating tables and indexes in IDS, including issues around dbspaces, lock modes, and extents. The author includes real-life examples gleaned from his experience.

Use IBM Informix 4GL with WebSphere MQ
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0501samuelsen/
Extend your IBM Informix 4GL applications to seamlessly communicate with IBM WebSphere MQ messaging system.

Useful Links

In response to your input, we have created a new page on the IIUG web site containing all the links we used to include. Please find it at: /quicklinks.html

Closing and Credits

The International Informix Users Group (IIUG) is an organization designed to enhance communications between its worldwide user community and IBM. 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.

Sources:	IIUG Board of Directors CopperEye IBM Corp.
Editors:	Jean Georges Perrin Stuart Litel Sam Gentsch
For comments, please send an email to enews@iiug.org.