Highlights: 2014 IIUG Informix conference in Miami April 27 thru May 1
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
- Conference corner
- Informix news
- Informix corner
- Support corner
- Calendar of events
- Informix resources
- Useful links
- Closing and credits
Editorial | Back to top |
As you probably know I am at the 2014 IIUG Informix conference. It was a pleasure meeting so many old friends and a special pleasure meeting Gibi whom I haven’t seen in quite a while.
Gibi was cheerful as usual. “Did you see the Oracle definition in TL;DR Wikipedia?” he asks. “No.” I replied, so he handed it to me. I later looked at TL;DR Wikipedia and couldn’t find it. It may have been removed but I heavily suspect Gibi just made it up. In any case I liked it so I’m sharing it with you.
TL;DR Wiki is hilarious. If you are not familiar with it take a look at:
http://tldrwikipedia.tumblr.com/
When I write this editorial I usually have in mind my many friends at the IIUG. This time I would also like to address IIUG members who are not only new to Informix but new to the computer business.
What Do We REALLY Mean?! — The Newbie Guide to Tech Lingo
So you just started working in a tech company. Congratulations. Even though it’s your first day, you probably already noticed that there are many of phrases and terms, which you don’t really truly understand. Well, this guide is meant to provide you with all the tools you need to properly understand what we REALLY mean when we’re saying something. Enjoy!
When We Say… | We REALLY Mean… |
Let’s take it off-line | Let’s not talk about it ever again |
Send me an e-mail about it | Let’s take it off-line (see above) |
We’re going to price it very aggressively | We’re going to lose our shirts |
It’s a high risk project | We’re going to lose our shirts |
It’s a strategic account | We’re going to lose our shirts |
It’s a 2-week project | It’s a 2-year project |
It’s a 2-year project | It’s a 2-week project |
It’s a matter of configuration | It’s a 2-year project |
It’s on the roadmap | We don’t have a roadmap |
It’s a field-proven technology | We can’t afford labs |
High reliability | We managed to make it work long enough in order to be “releasable” |
It’s a new version | The old one didn’t work, maybe this one will |
Local support | You can send it back to us via your local airport |
We are making certain product adjustments | We threw out all the old shit and we’re starting from scratch |
Clarification | We’ll supply you with so many details that you’ll forget what you asked in the first place |
FYI | I don’t get it! / look at me – I’m working! |
Expert | Any ordinary guy, at least 350Km away from home |
Comply | Not comply |
Sorry, but I forgot to bring my business cards | I work in QA |
We’ll think about it and get back to you | Now that we thought about it, we don’t want to think about it ever again |
I am still checking | I still haven’t found your e-mail in my inbox |
Reliable source | The guy I just met |
It’s in process | It’s out of hand |
First tests are not conclusive | The bloody thing exploded as soon as we turned it on |
First tests were very good | It worked, and – boy – are we surprised! |
We will begin design shortly | We haven’t even started working on it, but we have to say something |
Delivery | We will begin design shortly (q.v.) |
It’s not feasible | The only guy who understands this just quit |
We’ll outsource it | The only guy who understands this just quit |
It’s a long sale cycle | The client doesn’t want our product |
We’ll go for an M&A process | Our product has no market anymore |
Our product is cost-effective | Our product is very expensive and not at all effective |
Branding/Positioning | I sounded awfully smart, didn’t’ I? No one knows what that is anyway… |
We have a unique product offering | We haven’t got more than 5 competitors |
We have no competition | Apart from IBM, Microsoft and Cisco, and they just announced they’re going into the market |
It’s a tailor-made product | It’s not for you, but we’ll be happy if you will pay us for the development |
It’s a growth year | We are going to lose TONS of money |
It’s fully redundant | We are using the server’s RAID |
Raise a flag if there is any problem | You have no chance whatsoever to pull this one off |
Let’s think out of the box | Let’s take it off-line (q.v.) |
Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor
Highlights | Back to top |
2014 IIUG Informix conference in Miami April 27 thru May 1
I am writing this Insider from the IIUG Informix conference in Miami. What a marvelous event. Great sessions, great atmosphere and a great location. It is wonderful to meet so many friends and colleagues. For all of you who missed it make sure you come next year.
Today is the first day and I’v already attended many interesting sessions. I’m sure there are many good sessions I missed but that’s how it is. There is one session I would like to mention – the session by Sheng Huang from the IBM research lab in China. It was a great session but the reason I’m mentioning it is to share with you my enthusiasm for the fact that Informix is the database of choice for IBM research and that their cutting edge technology is in becoming part of Informix. The great things that are already in and the great things that will be soon make me more optimistic than ever about the future of Informix.
See you at the 2015 IIUG Informix conference!
Gary Ben-Israel
Conference corner | Back to top |
The Conference Planning Committee would like to thank IBM, our sponsors and speakers and especially our attendees for coming to Miami for this event. This event remains the largest gathering of Informix technical and user experts in the world. A huge thanks to the JW Marriott for allowing us to use their beautiful hotel for this event.
It was great to see so many familiar faces and a lot of new faces this year.
There are over 90 technical sessions over 3 days and many sessions were well attended. Sadly the Conference concludes tomorrow after a full day of tutorials.
We also want to thank those of you who completed your conference surveys. Believe it or not we do read these and take into consideration those comments that help us make the conference better each year. After all this conference is for you!
We will begin planning for next year’s conference within a few weeks. Once we have a destination selected and confirm our dates we send out the announcement so you can begin your planning. We will follow that up with a call for speaker request. So, it is never too early to think about a presentation for next year.
For those of you who could not attend this year we missed you and hope to see you at next year’s event so keep looking for our announcement.
Rhonda Hackenburg and the Entire Conference Planning Committee
IBM Information on Demand is now Insight 2014!
The name of the conference has changed for a reason: It.s no longer just about information; it.s what you can do with the information. Insight is the ideal forum to share your experiences and best practices in Big Data & Analytics with more than 13,000 of your peers. Areas of interest will include Information Management, Business Analytics and Enterprise Content Management, plus dozens of business and industry tracks and roadmaps.
Submit your proposal today to speak at Insight and take a larger role in this world-class event. All accepted speakers may be eligible to receive a free conference pass.
Submit your proposal by May 22, 2014.
Informix news | Back to top |
Gazzang Data Security Solutions Certified on IBM Informix
BusinessWire – April 16
Gazzang, the Big Data security experts, today announced its data security solutions are now certified on IBM Informix.
Youtube – April 24
Learn about the latest evolution in computing: Internet of Things and how Informix is leading the way.
Youtube – April 30
Paddy Power, a leader in online betting, set out to ensure 24/7 availability and performance by undertaking a complete overhaul of its IT infrastructure, building a super-scalable architecture with IBM Informix software at its core. They gained a scalable, reliable platform for growth that accommodates dynamic workloads and sudden peaks in demand, to deliver an exceptional customer experience at all times.
Informix corner | Back to top |
Webcast: Informix: Intelligent Database for Internet of Things
Date: June 5th, 2014
Speaker: Kevin Brown
Abstract: Internet of Things: what it is, the marketplace drivers, consumer and business needs and how Informix solutions address those needs with our unique capabilities (embedded/connected devices, cloud, hybrid database).
More Info
IBM Internet-of-Things / NoSQL & 2014 Spring / Summer Informix Roadshows
Coming to a location near you
A series of free two day technical events designed to give you insight into the proven IBM. technology that solves some of the toughest business problems in the world today. For the first time, this roadshow series incorporates two different types of events.
The first event:
For all IBM customers and is oriented to solving the massive change that is occurring in computing environments around the world. Specifically, unstructured data is flooding into organizations and companies are struggling to choose between a relational or NoSQL database to handle it. While NoSQL offers the ability to have dynamic elasticity with data and its organization, these databases lack essential elements common to enterprise class databases such as scalability, security, flexible deployment, transaction support and full data integration. Today, IBM offers a solution that can natively handle NoSQL and structured data simultaneously providing a single system with the seamless integration of all data within the enterprise.
This day is designed to help you understand how application developers can use native JSON and BSON data types as well as other NoSQL functions (including sharding) for complete plug-and-play compatibility with MongoDB and other NoSQL databases. But that.s not all. With IBM’s solution, application developers can access structured and unstructured data in a single statement and join them together as needed. NoSQL applications can use the enterprise-level capabilities of a structured database system including transaction support, backup and recovery, H/A, compression, enhanced scalability, security and access control. IBM’s solution enables the execution of comprehensive analytics using Cognos or other BI tools on NoSQL data in IBM’s market-leading in-memory data warehouse acceleration technology, commonly referred to as BLU. Best of all, this solution has a flexible deployment model including public or private cloud environments or hosted within the company’s data center.
It’s been said that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. That’s not true any more. You can have all the advantages of development and deployment in a NoSQL environment with the enterprise-class database technologies to store and analyze all data types with extreme performance, scalability, availability and flexibility while securely protecting the data in devices or in clouds.
A partial list of topics includes:
- What is NoSQL and why is it so popular?
- IBM’s solution for integrated NoSQL / JSON and SQL functionality
- A brief introduction to MongoDB
- Using SQL and NoSQL together
- Using advanced SQL and NoSQL features together
- Includes sharding by hash and by expression
- Data analytics on NoSQL
- More!!!
The second day:
Oriented specifically for Informix customers, this day is for those interested in learning about the full spectrum of Informix.s storage management and efficiency technologies. You’ll gain hands-on experience with dynamic and manual expansion of storage spaces. You’ll compress, repack and shrink data and indexes to see how these functions contribute to faster SQL performance. You’ll learn about proper space planning and sizing for maximum efficiency, database backup deduplication, and much, much more.
A partial list of topics includes:
- Configurable page size
- Fragmentation / partitioning of tables and indexes
- A brief detour into indexes and constraints
- Informix automatic storage provisioning
- Key terms and parameters
- Extending chunks
- Configuring and using the instance storage pool
- Extending dbspaces
- Informix storage management functions for efficiency
- Compression repack shrink defragment of tables and indexes
- Deduplication of backups
Each day will begin at 9:00 A.M. Breakfast and lunch will be provided each day.
Register now for the event closest to you by clicking below:
Location | Date | Event |
Salt Lake City | May 19 | Registration |
May 20 | Registration | |
Denver | May 22 | Registration |
May 23 | Registration | |
Phoenix | June 3 | Registration |
June 4 | Registration | |
Chicago | June 16 | Registration |
June 17 | Registration | |
Dallas | June 19 | Registration |
June 20 | Registration | |
San Jose, CA | June 25 | Registration |
June 26 | Registration | |
Toronto | July 7 | Registration |
July 8 | Registration | |
Ottawa | TBA | |
Montreal | July 15 | Registration |
July 16 | Registration | |
Atlanta | July 21 | Registration |
July 22 | Registration | |
Washington DC | July 24 | Registration |
July 25 | Registration | |
Costa Mesa, CA | July 30 | Registration |
July 31 | Registration | |
New York City | Aug. 6 | Registration |
Aug. 7 | Registration | |
Boston | Aug. 11 | Registration |
Aug. 12 | Registration | |
Seattle | Aug. 14 | Registration |
Aug. 15 | Registration | |
More cities to come! |
We look forward to seeing you there!!!
Support Corner | Back to top |
Tune logical and physical log automatically
Starting with version 12.10.xC3 Informix can automatically tune the logical and physical log as needed.
You can set the AUTO_LLOG configuration parameter to enable Informix to dynamically add logical logs when lack of logical logs causes frequent checkpoints, blocking checkpoints, long checkpoints etc. In addition, with AUTO_LLOG configuration parameter you can specify a dbspace in which to create new logical log files and the size of all logical log files at which the server stops adding logs for performance.
You are most probably thinking what about the the DYNAMIC_LOGS configuration parameters that exists since Informix version 10. The AUTO_LLOG and the DYNAMIC_LOGS configuration parameters works in different situations and do not interact with each other. When the AUTO_LLOG configuration parameter is enabled, logical logs are added to improve checkpoint performance. When the DYNAMIC_LOGS configuration parameter is enabled, logical logs are added under more urgent conditions, such as when a long transaction threatens to block the server. For example, the maximum size that is specified in the AUTO_LLOG configuration parameter does not affect the amount of log space that can be added by the DYNAMIC_LOGS configuration parameter. Similarly, the value of AUTO_LLOG configuration parameter does not affect the amount of log space that you can add manually.
Now, Informix also allows to expand the size of the physical log as needed to improve performance by creating an extendable chunk for the physical log. An extendable chunks can be automatically extend when additional storage space is required.
Typically, physical log get created in the root dbspace, unless you create an Informix instance during installation. However, for optimal performance it is better to create a separate dedicated dbspace for physical log on a different disk from the root dbspace and move the physical log out of root dbspace. In case, an instance created during installation the physical log create in a separate dbspace called plogspace with a default size that depends on the value of the AUTO_TUNE_SERVER_SIZE configuration parameter.
By default, the chunk that you assign to the plogspace is extendable, therefore, the initial size of the chunk can be small. The database server automatically expands the chunk when the physical log requires more space.
– Sanjit Chakraborty
Calendar of events | Back to top |
May – 2014 | |||
Date | Event | Location | Contact |
20 | Informix Benelux User Group Kickoff Meeting | IBM Client Center, Brussels | |
October – 2014 | |||
Date | Event | Location | Contact |
26-30 | IBM Insight 2014 | Las Vegas, Nevada |
Informix resources | Back to top |
http://www.informix.com or directly at: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/
Blogs and Wikis that have been updated during the last month
- PlanetIDS: Blogs, Videos, News and more *** Up to date feeds from many blogs ***
- Fernando Nunes
- Informix documentation team
- IDS Experts blog
- Art Kagel
- ognjen.orel
- Eric Vercelletto (In French)
More Blogs and Wikis
- Informix SQL Development
- Andrew Ford
- Eric Vercelletto (In English)
- Keshava Murthy
- Fred Ho
- Martin Fuerderer
Forums, groups, videos, and magazines
- The IIUG forums
- Informix Marketing channel on YouTube
- IBM data magazine
- Credentials, the IBM Certification Newsletter
- The Informix Zone
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 |
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. |
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Editors: | Gary Ben-Israel Rhonda Hackenburg |
For comments, please send an email to gary@iiug.org.