IIUG Insider (Issue #71) May 2006

Highlights: SAP certifies additional products on IDS 10; Conference survey

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.

The IDUG/IIUG conference in Tampa was a huge success. The attendance, the quantity and quality of sessions, the networking and social events were all outstanding. 2006 is going to be a great year from an educational point of view. In addition to the Tampa conference IBM will have the first ever Information on demand conference grouping all information management conferences into one spectacular event. And of course the IIUG in conjunction with IDUG are continuing the collaboration that started in Denver last year and continued in Tampa this year, to have the first DB2 and Informix conference in Europe. Due to circumstances beyond our control the conference has changed dates and location to Vienna October 2-6, 2006.

I must add a personal comment about the dates. I am well aware of Monday October 2 being Yom Kipur. Naturally I will not eat or work that day but I can assure you we had no other alternative and as a member of the conference planning committee I know it first-hand.

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor
IIUG Board of Directors
gary@iiug.org

Highlights

SAP certifies additional products on IDS 10

SAP recently announced certification of all version 6.40 and 4.6D products on IDS 10. This includes Netweaver 04 SR1, SAP R/3 and other products. This is an excellent opportunity to upgrade your existing infrastructure to the latest offerings from SAP and IBM Informix. For more details please visit the SAP Product Availability Matrix @ http://service.sap.com/pam or call your local IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.

Conference survey

HELP. Please give us feedback about our Informix conferences.

We would like you to please complete our IIUG survey about Informix conferences. If you went to the North American IIUG/IDUG conference in Tampa please take time to complete the survey. Also, if you DIDN’T go to the Tampa conference, please complete the survey. We need to hear from all of you. Here is the link you need http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=328092163910.

The survey is very short, at the most there is only 15 questions to answer. It will take you less than 5 minutes.

What’s it about? We want feedback from you who went to Tampa about the value you got from the event, the subjects that you would like added and any concerns you may have. More importantly, we want feedback from you who, for various reasons did not go to Tampa. Perhaps it was too expensive. Perhaps you could not get your managers support. Perhaps you live outside of the US. Perhaps it was the wrong time of year. Whatever the reason we want to know.

What will happen once the survey is closed.

Obviously, the results will go to our conference planning teams. But we will also publish the results of the survey in the Insider.

Again. Please do the survey NOW. It is fast and simple, and really useful.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=328092163910

Kind regards,
David Fraser
Survey monkey

Conference corner

IDUG/IIUG Europe Conference Vienna, October 2-6, 2006

IIUG is getting closer to Europe, and the IIUG conference is now closer to our European members. Stay tuned! Use the following link for Conference Information and Registration:

/conf

For our European members who have not attended the US conferences we have sessions like:

Understanding New & Sparsely Documented onstats, Point in Time Table Level Restore, Dive into the Depths of Variable-Length Data Types by John Miller and Open Source and Informix Dynamic Server, Using Column Level Encryption in IDS 10, Is your DBA Paranoid enough? By Jonathan Leffler.

Along with these highly rated presentations there will be first time presentations like:

Datablade Memory Management, Making Best Use of IDS 10 New Features by Cosmo and IDS Internals for Windows, Application Optimization, JDBC, JSP and J/foundation by Guy Bowerman.

Mark your calendars. This is a conference you must attend.

Cheers, Paul Watson and Gary Ben-Israel IIUG Europe Conference Planning Committee IIUG Board of Directors

$400 Off Information On Demand 2006 Conference Tickets Until June 30

It’s an exclusive early bird offer for IIUG members! IBM is offering a limited-time price of $1,495 – that’s a $400 discount, the deepest discount available – to IIUG members who register to attend IBM Information On Demand 2006 by June 30, 2006. Register now at ibm.com/events/InformationOnDemand and enter Promotion Code “DKU23” under the “Company Information” section of the enrollment form.

The IBM Information On Demand 2006 global conference will be held in Anaheim, California, October 15-20, 2006. It is the premier information management event for business and IT executives, managers, professionals, DBA’s and developers. The conference features over 650 technical education sessions as well as hands on lab workshops and free certification testing.

IDUG/IIUG 2006 – North America Recap

Pre-eminent annual conference for DB2 and Informix professionals exceeds expectations
More than 1,200 members of the worldwide DB2 and Informix user communities gathered together for IDUG 2006 – North America, May 7-11 at the Tampa Convention Center, Tampa, Fla., USA. Representing an estimated 10 percent increase in attendance from the 2005 conference, the gathered community enjoyed an exceptional week of education, learning, solution sharing and peer networking.

On Sunday, May 7, the conference commenced with a series of full-day and half-day educational seminars presented by several of the industry’s leading Informix authorities, including Art Kagel, Lester Knutsen, and John Miller. These in-depth seminars provided an excellent springboard to the following four days of diverse technical session offerings.

During the general session on Monday, Bob Picciano of IBM presented the keynote address Information as a Service…A New Era in Databases. As Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Information Management Solutions, Picciano noted the challenges faced in the information management field as the pace of business continues to accelerate, and the role in which delivering information as a service can significantly simplify these challenges. According to Picciano, in order to achieve this, a new breed of information management technology is required, starting with the database. During the presentation, attendees were introduced to new technologies to support this new era of information management and innovative uses of information by IBM clients.

Attendees Go Further with Diverse Technical Sessions
Throughout the conference attendees chose from more than 50 hours of Informix technical sessions which were offered on a variety of topics including Informix Disk Subsystems (IDS), Enterprise Replication, Performance Monitoring and Tuning, Application Development with JAVA, WebDatablade, and SQL. To facilitate attendee trip reports, the session presentations are posted on the IIUG web site. Please go to:

http://www.iiug.org

In yet another effort to provide attendees with the chance to let their opinions be heard, User Feedback Opportunities (UFOs) were offered throughout the week. By creating an open forum for IBM to collect feedback on the usage and usability of the core Informix products, attendees had a chance to directly influence the future direction of IBM Information Management technologies. Similarly, Vendor Solution Presentations (VSPs) allowed attendees direct access to gather in-depth knowledge about vendor products and services in a focused environment.

At the conference closing session on Thursday, May 11, IIUG announced the best-rated sessions from the conference:

The Best User Presenter award went to Art Kagel for his “Performance Tuning IDS 10 in Depth” Session.

The Best Overall Presentation Award went to John H. Miller III from IBM for his “Understanding New and Sparsely Documented OnStats” Session.

Attendee quotes
“I attended and presented. I found the conference even more productive than the one last year – mainly because there was no reason for me to waste time taking in any DB2 sessions this year (grin). There was a futures session to which about 1/3 of the Informix users attending were invited to get info from IBM and give feedback that they are on the right track – they are!

There was a meeting with the head of Information Management marketing and of Informix Marketing and it was clear from that session that while they don’t yet understand fully what they are doing, they finally ‘Get It’ about IDS and are actively selling the product and are beginning to understand why we all love the product beyond the simple loyalty issues that IBM once thought was the entire picture.

There were somewhere between 100 & 150 attendees who identified with IIUG instead of IDUG, but the numbers are not final as some IIUG members registered as IDUG either in error or because their firms are both. Considering the extra expense that compares favorably with Atlanta.”

Art S. Kagel

“I felt that the conference was a tremendous value. It was a very revelatory experience for me, never having been before. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the individuals who design and maintain the Informix tools that I use everyday to develop software. The ability to discuss optimal design and implementation methodology with them, as well as the options available in current IDEs and tools was a unique educational experience that is probably unobtainable elsewhere. I also felt a strong sense of community and purpose among the IIUG leadership, which I immediately identified with. I hope to attend as many future IIUG conferences as possible and will strongly recommend it to my colleagues. Thank you for organizing such an outstanding conference.”

Steve Browning, Systems Analyst/Programmer
US District Courts
Southern District of Texas, Houston
713 250 5624

Mark your calanders for IDUG/IIUG 2007 North America, May 6-10, 2007 in San Jose California. The IIUG is currently accepting responses to the Call for Presentations. Please go to the following link to submit a paper and read the guidelines:

http://conferences.idug.org/GeneralInformation/IDUG2007NorthAmerica/tabid/270/Default.aspx

Responses will be accepted through September 1, 2006. Remember that speakers whose presentations are selected for the conference will have their registration fee waived!

IIUG Board of Directors corner

IIUG Annual General Meeting

At the 2006 Annual General Meeting of the International Informix Users Group in Tampa, FL at the IDUG conference I gave a report of the IIUG for the past year and the Board honored two members of the Informix Community for the Annual “Directors” Award. Here are some of the highlights of that meeting:

I want to thank Cindy Lichtenauer and the IIUG Conference Planning Committee (CPC) for once again doing an outstanding job of planning and executing a wonderful conference in conjunction with IDUG. The other CPC committee members of James Edmiston, Tammy Frankforter and Kernoal Stephens were introduced.
We re-introduced the Informix Forum. A place for IIUG members to talk about NON technical Informix topics on the IIUG web site which is available at /forums/informix-forum/
Membership static’s were released, as the IIUG has almost 13,500 active members in the database who receive this newsletter and a web site that has over 1.1 million hits each month!
Also announced was that the IIUG will officially be participating in the IDUG European Conference this coming October 2006 in Vienna, Austria. IIUG Board members Gary Ben-Israel and Paul Watson will be chairing the event for the IIUG
A few IDUG “thank you”s were in order for Joe Burns (IDUG CPC Chairperson), Robert Omerza (IDUG Past president) and the entire IDUG Board and CPC Committee.
And finally the winners of the 2006 IIUG Directors Award were announced and the winners were John F. Miller and James Edmiston.

Although the official Annual General Meeting for the IIUG is held at the North American Conference, we hope to hold such a meeting.

Informix Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

Need help? Want advice? Want a challenge? Or just plain lonely?

What ever is your mental state right now you need to be IN the Informix Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

There is only one show in town if you want to talk to, ask help from, or just be plain nerdy about, Informix. Do you have a love affair with 4gl? Then you need to be in the “Classics” forum. Is your onlog in your ontape and your extent under your left join. The sort it out in the IDS forum. Want to sound off about the Informix brand. Then go to the Informix forum. What ever your problem is, real people with real names can help you sort it out.

To read the SIG’s just go to /forums. To get new SIG postings sent to you, log in to the member area (your personalized link to the member area is at the bottom of this Insider) and subscribe to email lists. To post messages you can either reply to a SIG email or log in and use the browser based forum pages. If you are a RSS freak the go to /rss and drop the feed info into your RSS reader. The SIG’s are easy to use and… you might even learn something useful while you are there. 🙂

Be good
Aunty David
SIGman

The 2005 IIUG member survey is yours for the browsing

11 pages, full of fascinating information about our Informix community, is bound up in the 2005 IIUG member survey and it is yours, absolutely FREE. Find out about how often IBM calls on our members… and how good they are. Learn how much IBM Sales Reps actually know about Informix? Discover how long it takes IBM to return a call? Examine what our users intentions are with Informix going forward? All good stuff. Get it now!

So… how do you get it? Simple. Log into the member area ( using your personalized link at the bottom of the Insider) and there it is, on a tab. It will be there for about a month before we bury it somewhere in the IIUG vault. So go get it now.

BTW. If you are interested in a particular cross tab then email me david@iiug.org and I will run the numbers and post it in the Informix forum.

Cheers
Ron Flannery, David Fraser
The blokes responsible

Education

Informix Infobahns are back! Register today for an event in your region!

IDS is a strategic data server in the IBM Information Management portfolio. Come hear the message from IBM executives and regional managers, learn about the IDS product strategy and roadmap, and discover what makes Informix technology the ideal solution for your high-volume OLTP environment. This event is designed for both decision makers and data server professionals. For questions about the event or to inquire about scheduling an event in your region, please send an email to Michael Cohn at mcohn@us.ibm.com.

13 June 2006 – Informix Infobahn – Prague, Czech Republic
http://www.ibm.com/cz/events/infobahn/

20 June 2006 – Informix Infobahn – Munich, Germany
http://www.ibm.com/de/events/infobahn/

21 June 2006 – Informix Infobahn – Frankfurt, Germany
http://www.ibm.com/de/events/infobahn/

22 June 2006 – Informix Infobahn – Berlin, Germany
http://www.ibm.com/de/events/infobahn/

RAID5 versus RAID10

If you are considering purchasing a RAID 5 Disk system or if you have one already I recommend reading the Following article: http://www.baarf.com/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt by Art S. Kagel. I am sure you will find it useful and instructive. In the full article you will find a technical description of RAID 5 and RAID 10 technologies and will understand how Art gets to the following conclusion.

“To put things into perspective: If a drive costs $1000US (and most are far less expensive than that) then switching from a 4 pair RAID10 array to a 5 drive RAID5 array will save 3 drives or $3000US. What is the cost of overtime, wear and tear on the technicians, DBAs, managers, and customers of even a recovery scare? What is the cost of reduced performance and possibly reduced customer satisfaction? Finally what is the cost of lost business if data is unrecoverable? I maintain that the drives are FAR cheaper! Hence my mantra:

NO RAID5! NO RAID5! NO RAID5! NO RAID5! NO RAID5! NO RAID5! NO RAID5!”

Attention gurus! Publish your Informix technical success stories on IBM developerWorks!

IBM is looking for experienced Informix professionals to write technical articles for the Informix Zone on developerWorks. Share your expertise with the community by describing real-life scenarios where business problems were solved with an Informix implementation. This is your opportunity to help spread the word about IDS’s blazing OLTP performance and legendary reliability. Of particular interest would be code samples, techniques for optimization and administration, or configuration processes. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to get published on IBM.com, develop personal credentials, and of course, get paid! Please send your article proposals to Michael Cohn at mcohn@us.ibm.com.

The 2006 International EGL User Conference will be held August 1 – 2 at the beautiful campus of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill – Kenan Flagler Business School. This year’s conference offers a variety of technical product sessions, customer testimonials, product demonstrations and much more to show the breadth and depth of this powerful technology. Seating is limited so please register early! The conference web site with full details and registration can be found at:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/events/eglconferenindex.php

IDS is IDS is IDS

Understand the basic licensing rules, functions, and feature differences between the members of the IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) family of products. Author Christine Normile makes it easy with a side-by-side comparison table.

June – 2006
Date	Event	Location	Contact
7	Chicago Informix User Group Meeting	Chicago Athletic Association	Sam Alwan
8	Southern California Informix User Group Meeting	IBM Facility, Costa Mesa	Bruce Marchu
13	Informix Infobahn	Prague, Czech Republic	Michael N Cohn
20	Informix Infobahn	Munich, Germany	Michael N Cohn
21	Informix Infobahn	Frankfurt, Germany	Michael N Cohn
22	Informix Infobahn	Berlin, Germany	Michael N Cohn

July – 2006
Date	Event	Location	Contact

26	Washington (DC) Area Informix User Group Meeting	IBM Facility, Bethesda MD	Lester Knutsen

August – 2006
Date	Event	Location	Contact
1-2	International EGL User Conference	University of North Carolina
October – 2006
Date	Event	Location	Contact
2-6	IDUG/IIUG 2006 – Europe	Vienna, Austria	Paul Watson
15-20	IBM Information on Demand Global Conference	Anaheim, California

Sources:		IIUG Board of Directors IBM Corp.
Editors:		Gary Ben Israel Stuart Litel Jean Georges Perrin

IIUG Insider (Issue #71) May 2006

Contents:

By Vicente Salvador