IIUG Insider (Issue #166) April 2014

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 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

IIUG 2014 Miami, Florida!

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.

IBM Informix NoSQL Teaser

Youtube – April 24
Learn about the latest evolution in computing: Internet of Things and how Informix is leading the way.

Paddy Power Reference

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!!!

http://tinyurl.com/mjmptfo

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

IBM Informix home page

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

Informix blogs and wikis

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.

Published
Categorized as Insider

By Vicente Salvador

Board member since 2014, a user since 1989 and Informix fan. I'am software architect which allow me to combine technical and business skills.