IIUG Insider (Issue #175) January 2015

Highlights: The IIUG board is meeting in Prague

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

This is the first 2015 Insider. Two great things happened last year. Informix was positioned in the Internet of Things, and GBASE and IBM collaborated on locally innovated database in China.

So 2015 is promising. I wish us all a wonderful year. I am looking forward to IIUG 2015 in San Diego. I hope you are as well.

Enjoy 2015, enjoy the Insider and enjoy Informix.

Gary Ben-Israel

Highlights Back to top

The IIUG board is meeting in Prague

The IIUG board will hold its first meeting In Prague February 7-8.

We are planning a new website that will be presented during this year and looking at new things we can do for our community. If you have suggestions, concerns or remarks you can send them to me or any other board member and they will be discussed. I will report about the meeting in the February Insider.

Conference corner Back to top

IIUG 2015 – Celebrating 20 years with the IIUG

Sorry if you missed the early bird registration, but you can still save on your registration. Register by February 28th and use your IIUG member discount to reduce your fee by $100.

IIUG 2015 promises to be one our best events ever. We will have:

  • a full day of tutorials,
  • over 80 sessions,
  • several hands-on labs and
  • this year, we will be celebrating 20 years of the IIUG.

If you miss this year’s event, you’re going to be missing a lot.

There will be several sessions on new technologies: NoSQL and Internet of Things (IoT) both of which play well with Informix. Who can resist the ever popular sessions on performance tuning, security and best practices for your database. We also have several developer sessions including using Genero, PHP or Java among others. You could also check out one of several case studies presented this year from real users — hear their Informix stories and solutions.

Tutorials are once again included with all paid registrations. Speakers and sponsors can attend the tutorials for a nominal fee. Why not enhance your educational experience by attending one or more of these in-depth classes with the new and existing technologies.

Selected sessions and tutorials will be listed on the website shortly so keep checking back.

This event would not be possible without our many speakers. We want to take the time to recognize and thank our user speakers for this year, many of whom you may already know because they are leaders in the Informix community: Tom Beebe, Jerry Bowman, Alex Cheng, Jeff Fillippi, Andrew Ford, Tom Girsh, Art Kagel, Bob Kruse, Ognjen Orel, Jean Georges Perrin, Petr Pomykacek, Benjamin Thompson, Eric Vercelletto, Rob Vorbroker and Mike Walker. This event has just so many great speakers you will find it hard to choose.

This is just a VERY small sampling of what this year’s event has to offer and there is so much more. To see the list of sessions, tutorials and all things related to IIUG 2015 please visit www.iiug2015.org.

Register today to take part of this technology packed Informix event and help us celebrate 20 years of the IIUG.

See you April 26-29 in San Diego, CA, USA

The IIUG 2015 Planning Committee

IBM Interconnect 2015

The IBM Interconnect 2015 conference will be held in Las Vegas February 22 – 26. The role of Informix in the IBM Internet Of Things (IoT) architecture will be the focus at this event. I am sharing with you below some details about the key sessions where IoT and Informix capabilities will be showcased.

Informix Sessions:

  • Expo Theater – Monday 6:30 – 6:50 – Constructing the IoT Solution by Jerry Keesee
  • Hands-on Lab ITI-1123: Get Hands-On with IBM’s Internet of Things Database Engine by Carlton Doe
  • Hands-on Lab IAB-2001: Application Development Using a Hybrid Database by Yao Liang Chen
  • Session ITI-1017: Smarter Industry Solutions Powered by Innovation by Richard Wozniak
  • Session ICP-1026: Managing Internet of Things Data on the Edge and in the Cloud with Intel and IBM Informix Solutions by Kevin Brown
Support corner Back to top

Avoiding an assertion failure

Any time the database server encounters an issue and cannot continue normal processing, the engine may need to shut down to prevent data from becoming damaged. Some problems that lead to assertion failures can be prevented, avoided or mitigated. If your production server goes down due to an unforeseen issue, you should contact IBM Software Support as soon as possible. Some assertion failures are fixable after the fact, if you locate the assertion failure message in the online.log. Perform any action mentioned in the assertion failure message, such as suggestions to run an oncheck command.

While performing routine administrative tasks, it is possible to prevent some assertion failures or to at least ease the recovery if an assertion failure occurs. The two main prevention steps are:

  • Test your applications thoroughly in a realistic environment before releasing your applications into production.
  • Regularly check and repair data consistency. A complete ‘onchecklist’ includes:
    • oncheck -cc: System catalogs
    • oncheck -cr: Reserved pages
    • oncheck -cI: Index pages
    • oncheck -ce: Chunk-free list
    • oncheck -cD: Data pages

Here is a simple mnemonic to remember all the options: “Check so you are the one who C-r-i-e-d first” (-c is ’check’, and the other letters spell ‘c-r-I-e-D’).

– David Jay

RFE Corner Back to top

Just in case you are not aware, some time ago IBM created a public website to collect the requests for new features directly from users. The RFE (Requests For Enhancements) website is included in developerWorks. You can access it here.

Once you logged in with your usual IBM ID, choose “Information Management” in the Brand dropdown box and “Informix Servers” or “Client Products” in the Products dropdown box.

The interesting thing is that any request, including your request, if you place one, are submitted to be voted on. This means the RFEs that receive more votes have a greater chance to be considered by the architecture and development teams for further consideration. In other words, this IS the opportunity to provide enhancement ideas even if you are not the biggest IBM customer on the planet Earth.

Some RFEs will be of great interest, others will not seem useful to you. This is why your opinion is important. Do not hesitate to vote and place comments!

The idea of the RFE corner is to provide a digest on new Informix RFEs and make those RFEs more visible and accessible for the community, so that you can vote for them in a faster and easier way. By participating actively in this website, IBM will have solid and useful elements from the customer base to introduce new functionality to Informix product.

Also in the area of IBM website, a new functionality has been released: MyNotifications. You will want to register this webpage in order to receive the notifications of your choice (new product defects, new patch release, new versions etc…, on the frequency of your choice (daily, weekly). I have registered and will definitely keep registered, due to the value of the information delivered.

Register here.

New RFEs for January 2015

We are in 2015, so may you receive my best wishes for this new year! The RFE has been moderate during this month, probably due to urgencies of year beginning. Let’s look at this:

Allow virtual rowid columns in fragmented by range tables.

Votes: 1

Allow rowid columns in tables fragmented by range or rolling window. Syntax “WITH ROWIDS” is already working but engine throws exception.

Request to add this column with receiving an engine error

“Enable SQL schema expressions so 32k expression sizes are not required”

Votes: 1

Schema expressions can be longer than 32k, since 11.70, but they are broken into a smaller series of expressions in order to support backward capability to 11.50 schema expressions. It would help to have an environment or onconfig variable which allows for “no backward compatibility required”, thus enabling the expressions to be a single statement when they are generated.

Request to use long schema expressions without breaking them in a series a short expressions, decided by setting an environment variable.

Cannot logically restore a table when restoring smart blobs

Votes: 1

We use archecker to perform table-level-restores. For various reasons it has to be on a point-in-time basis, which is not possible if a table has columns of data type blob. This gives the following error occurs: “Cannot logically restore a table when restoring smart blobs. Only physical restore of smart blobs is currently supported for table-level restore.”

Request to support Logical restore of logged smart blobs

IWA: Include session_id information in ondwa tasks output

Votes: 1

We need a method to have a relationship between an IWA task executing or in the queue and the sessions_id on the original IDS server, so that we can track which users and why are executing this kind of requests and blocking/queuing other users requests. I think best approach is to include the session_id value in the output of ondwa tasks, but other solutions are welcome.

Request to include this relationship between IDS thread with IDS thread.

While creating a ER Template through OAT, need the ability to specify target database name

Votes: 0

I have two instances on two different servers with separate database names. How can I create replicates between them using Informix OAT? I tried but the tool i9s creating the replicates with the same database name as the first server.

Request possibility to specify target database name when create an ER template with OAT.

Informix HTML datatype support across distributed queries

Votes: 0

The type of HTML is not widely supported by other APIs other than WebDatablade. Therefore, when a query is made within a distributed query system, where user is inside database db1, and query with html column is made for database db2, error “-9270 Type <opaque_type_name> is unsupported in distributed queries.” is thrown.

Request to support HTML datatype across distributed queries.

…

Do not forget to vote for one or several of those RFE’s if they fit your requirements. The more vote, the more chances that the Dev Team will seriously consider the request.

You can access each RFE by clicking on the above links. At the bottom of each RFE page you will find a hyperlink to vote for it. You will see the Request stats, including number of votes for this request, on the right side of the request page. The more votes, the greater the chance an enhancement will be addressed by the Development Team, taking into consideration the general interest.

Take some time to examine the full list and vote for the enhancements you would like to see implemented.

Eric Vercelletto

Calendar of events Back to top
April – 2015
Date Event Location Contact
26-30 IIUG 2015 San Diego, CA 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

Blogs and Wikis that have been updated during the last month

More Blogs and Wikis

Forums, groups, videos, and magazines

  • The IIUG forums
  • Informix Marketing channel on YouTube
  • IBM Data Magazine
  • Credentials, the IBM Certification Newsletter
  • The Informix Zone
  • 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.