IIUG Insider (Issue #160) – October 2013

Highlights: Finally heading down under

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 Back to top

The IIUG Board will be meeting at the IBM Information on Demand 2013 conference. As always it is the perfect place if you are looking for more than just Informix content. However, if you are an Informix user, besides attending the Informix sessions join us at the Informix reception held on Sunday, November 3, 2013 from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM at the Border Grill Mandalay (950 South Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV 89101). We hope to see many of you there.

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor

Highlights Back to top

Finally heading down under

For almost two years I have been trying to set up a few Informix/IIUG one-day events in Australia and New Zealand and we are finally doing them. Jerry Keesee (World Wide Director of IBM Informix Software) will be joining me on a three city tour in Sydney (November 19), Melbourne (November 20) and Auckland (November 22). At these three one-day events we will be joined by some great speakers. There is no fee for attendance but we do ask you to sign up. For more details and the exact locations, visit www.iiug.org/ausnz.

I hope many of you can make it!!

Stuart Litel
IIUG President

Conference corner Back to top

IIUG 2014 Call for Presentations is now open

The IIUG Conference Planning Committee is proud to sponsor the 2014 IIUG Conference. We are currently accepting presentation proposals for the conference which is to be held April 27 – May 1, 2014 at the JW Marriott Miami, Florida, 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 Conference Committee invites you to submit a proposal to speak at the 2014 Conference. Now we ALL could answer “YES” to any of the above questions. But few of us will submit a proposal for a session. Why not? Do we think that everybody already knows what we know? Or that nobody would be interested in what we have to say? The conference committee has been brainstorming this for years: How can we attract more speakers from the Informix User community? What will motivate a member of the Informix family to volunteer to speak at the conference, and thus “give back” to the community? While we do offer incentives in the form of waived conference fees and the like, nowhere in the definition of “volunteer” does the word “compensation” appear, unless it is preceded by “no.” So what can we do to motivate YOU to speak this time around?

As we go about our daily routines, and our not so routine routines, there are tasks that we perform that are very similar to those that many other folks do. But we all must admit that personally we feel that “our way” of performing these tasks is better than “yours.” You know this is true! Show us! Your presentation doesn’t have to be an all day dissertation either. We have all been in enough technical sessions to realize that if the topic is good, questions and discussion will always more than fill the allotted time slots, which are usually about an hour.

The 2014 Conference will be comprised of three days of technical/user sessions, a series of hands-on-labs and one day of comprehensive tutorials intended to reinforce the power of Informix. Presentation proposals should be brief, highlighting the Informix technical solutions, real world experiences or trade tips you will include in your presentation. Multiple presentations are encouraged. Speaker guidelines can be found atwww.iiug2014.org/speakers.

As in the past, conference speakers (non IBM employees) are provided with a complimentary pass providing access to conference sessions, meals and conference related networking events. Use www.iiug2014.org/speakers to register your proposal.

The deadline for submitting 2014 IIUG Conference proposals is November 20, 2013. For your convenience, speaker logins have been retained for those who submitted a 2013 IIUG Conference proposal. Please submit your proposal and biography today for consideration.

See you in Miami!

The 2014 IIUG Informix Conference Team
2014 Conference Web Site www.iiug2014.org
Email: conference@iiug.org

Special Note from the IIUG President: At this time all we are looking for is an idea and simple abstract of your presentations. Draft and final presentations are not due until much later in the process in early 2014. So at this time, it is simple, all you need is a good idea, a few simple sentences about that idea and a short bio on you as the speaker. If you feel unsure on what to present or how to present, drop me an email at president@iiug.organd I personally will work with you and if you wish, I will even get up and do the actual presentation with you at the conference (provided I understand the topic).

Informix events at the Information on Demand Conference 2013 Global Conference

Here is the list of Informix events at IOD 2013. Please click on the link (next to the event name) to know more details and to register for the event.

Hurry, seats are filling up fast. Looking forward to your participation.

Developer corner Back to top

New in developerWorks

Compare the Informix Version 12 editions
Get an introduction to the various editions of IBM Informix, and compare features, benefits, and licensing considerations in a side-by-side table. Regardless of which edition you choose, Informix brings you legendary ease-of-use, reliability, stability, and access to extensibility features.

Also available in: Chinese Chinese Russian Portuguese

01 Oct 2013

For more information go to: developerWorks – Informix

Informix news Back to top

Big Data and working with what you have

TechRepublic
October 2
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/big-data-analytics/big-data-and-working-with-what-you-have/

Support corner Back to top

Monitor Resource Contention

Two new onstat commands introduced in 12.10.xC2 to view the dependencies between blocking and waiting threads. A running threads take ownership of various objects and resources; for example, buffers, locks, mutexes, decision support memory etc. Contention for these resources among hundreds or thousands of threads can result in chains of dependencies.

Now, you can use the ‘onstat -g bth’ command to display the dependencies between blocking and waiting threads. Next, use the ‘onstat -g BTH’ command to display session and stack information for the blocking threads.

Here is a scenario where these onstat commands can be helpful. It possible a thread that is blocked waiting to enter a critical section might own a row lock for which another thread is waiting. The second thread might be blocking a third thread that is waiting in the MGM query queue. Usually, the duration of such contention is short and user never notice any problem. However, if a thread is blocked long enough, you might need to identify the source of the contention. The ‘onstat -g bth’ command discovers the chains of dependency and displays blocker threads followed by waiting threads, in order.

The following is a sample output of the ‘onstat -g bth’ command where multiple threads are waiting on resources.


Highest level blocker(s)
 tid      name                 session
 48       sqlexec              26

Threads waiting on resources
 tid      name                 blocking resource              blocker
 49       sqlexec              MGM                            48
 13       readahead_0          Condition (ReadAhead)           -
 50       sqlexec              Lock (0x4411e578)              49
 51       sqlexec              Lock (0x4411e578)              49
 52       sqlexec              Lock (0x4411e578)              49
 53       sqlexec              Lock (0x4411e578)              49
 57       bf_priosweep()       Condition (bp_cond)             -
 58       scan_1.0             Condition (await_MC1)           -
 59       scan_1.0             Condition (await_MC1)           -

Run ‘onstat -g BTH’ for more info on blockers.

In the above example, four threads are waiting for a lock that is owned by thread 49. However, that’s not the actual problem. The thread 49 is waiting for MGM resources that are owned by thread 48. So, originally problem started with the thread 48. Next, run the ‘onstat -g BTH’ command to see the session and stack information of thread 48. Following is the example for ‘onstat -g BTH’ output:


Stack for thread: 48 sqlexec
 base: 0x00000000461a3000
  len:   69632
   pc: 0x00000000017b32c3
  tos: 0x00000000461b2e30
state: ready
   vp: 1

0x00000000017b32c3 (oninit) yield_processor_svp
0x00000000017bca6c (oninit) mt_wait
0x00000000019d4e5c (oninit) net_buf_get
0x00000000019585bf (oninit) recvsocket
0x00000000019d1759 (oninit) tlRecv
0x00000000019ce62d (oninit) slSQIrecv
0x00000000019c43ed (oninit) pfRecv
0x00000000019b2580 (oninit) asfRecv
0x000000000193db2a (oninit) ASF_Call
0x0000000000c855dd (oninit) asf_recv
0x0000000000c8573c (oninit) _iread
0x0000000000c835cc (oninit) _igetint
0x0000000000c72a9e (oninit) sqmain
0x000000000194bb38 (oninit) listen_verify
0x000000000194ab8a (oninit) spawn_thread
0x0000000001817de3 (oninit) th_init_initgls
0x00000000017d3135 (oninit) startup

Highest level blocker(s)
 tid      name                 session
 48       sqlexec              26

session          effective                      #RSAM    total   used   dynamic
id      user     user      tty   pid   hostname threads  memory  memory explain
26      informix -         45    31041 mors     2        212992  186568 off

Program :

/work3/JC/VIEWS/jc_dct_phase2.view/.s/00055/80003fd351f804d3dbaccess

tid      name     rstcb            flags    curstk   status
48       sqlexec  448bc5e8         ---P---  4560     ready-
58       scan_1.0 448bb478         Y------  896      cond wait  await_MC1 -

Memory pools    count 2
name         class addr           totalsize  freesize   #allocfrag #freefrag
26           V     45fcc040       208896     25616      189        16
26*O0        V     462ad040       4096       808        1          1

name           free       used           name           free       used
overhead       0          6576           mtmisc         0          72
resident       0          72             scb            0          240
opentable      0          7608           filetable      0          1376
log            0          33072          temprec        0          17744
blob           0          856            keys           0          176
ralloc         0          55344          gentcb         0          2240
ostcb          0          2992           sqscb          0          21280
sql            0          11880          xchg_desc      0          1528
xchg_port      0          1144           xchg_packet    0          440
xchg_group     0          104            xchg_priv      0          336
hashfiletab    0          1144           osenv          0          2520
sqtcb          0          15872          fragman        0          1024
shmblklist     0          416            sqlj           0          72
rsam_seqscan   0          368

sqscb info
scb              sqscb          optofc   pdqpriority optcompind  directives
4499c1c0         461c1028       0        100         2           1

Sess       SQL            Current       Iso Lock       SQL  ISAM F.E.
Id         Stmt type      Database      Lvl Mode       ERR  ERR  Vers  Explain
26         SELECT         jc            CR  Not Wait   0    0    9.24  Off

Current statement name : unlcur

Current SQL statement (5) :
  select * from systables,syscolumns,sysfragments

Last parsed SQL statement :
  select * from systables,syscolumns,sysfragments

– Sanjit Chakraborty

Calendar of events Back to top
November – 2013
Date Event Location Contact
3-7 IBM Information on Demand 2013 Las Vegas, Nevada
January – 2014
Date Event Location Contact
15 Colorado Informix User Group Meeting Denver, Colorado
April – 2014
Date Event Location Contact
27 2014 IIUG Informix Conference Miami, Florida Cindy Lichtenauer


Informix resources Back to top

IBM Informix home page

http://www.informix.com or directly at: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/

Informix blogs and wikis

I am trying something new on this section. I will first mention the blogs and wikis that have been updated during the last month. Blogs and wikis that have not been updated for over 6 months will be removed.

Blogs and Wikis that have been updated during the last month

More Blogs and Wikis


Forums, groups, videos, and magazines

There is now 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.

Useful links Back to top

/quicklinks.html

Closing and credits Back to top

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.

Sources: IIUG Board of Directors
IBM Corp.
Editors: Gary Ben-Israel
Rhonda Hackenburg

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