Highlights: Announcing the 2015 IIUG Board of Directors Election
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
- Support corner
- Informix news
- Informix corner
- RFE corner
- Calendar of events
- Informix resources
- Useful links
- Closing and credits
| Editorial | Back to top |
The 2015 IIUG Board of Directors election begins on March 30th with online voting through April 13th. We have 12 candidates for 10 slots on the board. I personally know all the candidates and can assure you they are all worthy. But still it is up to you to decide who will be on the next board. The results will be announced April 27 at the IIUG General Annual Meeting at the IIUG2015 event in San Diego.
Wish you all happy spring holidays, hope to see many of you in San Diego, and hope to continue serving you as the Insider editor.
Gary Ben-Israel
| Highlights | Back to top |
Announcing the 2015 IIUG Board of Directors Election
Good Morning, Good Afternoon or Good Evening depending on your location in the world wide Informix Community.
If you have not already seen the announcement posted to iiug.org, it is my pleasure to inform you the 2015 IIUG Board of Directors election began Monday, March 30, 2015. All IIUG Members that joined prior to Midnight US Eastern Time of February 28, 2015 are eligible to vote and are encouraged to do so.
This year we have 12 candidates running to fill 10 Board of Directors positions, so your vote is important! Please take a moment within the next two weeks to review each candidate’s election address so you may make an informed decision with your vote.
Click here for candidate statements and a link to your online ballot
Election Schedule
- Election Announced – March 23, 2015
- Election Begins – March 30, 2015 12:01 am US Eastern Time
- Election Ends – April 13, 2015 5:00 pm US Eastern Time
- Election Results Announced – April 27, 2015
- New Board Takes Office – May 1, 2015 12:01 am US Eastern Time
Instructions regarding how to place your vote will be made available at iiug.org when the election begins on March 30, 2015. If you have not voted before, it is a quick and painless process and again I encourage you to vote and have your voice heard. Thank you for your time and best of luck to all the candidates.
Andrew Ford
IIUG Election Commissioner
board-election@iiug.org
| Conference corner | Back to top |
IIUG 2015 is less than a month away
IMPORTANT: The IIUG has reserved rooms at the San Diego Mission Valley Marriott for IIUG2015 attendees. If you are planning to attend this year’s event you will want to book your room today. The number of rooms at the special rate is dwindling. We will not be able to assist you if you miss out on this special rate!
You have until April 19th to register online for IIUG2015 and even less time to apply your $100 IIUG Membership Discount for a total cost of $1150 USD. Remember, your IIUG2015 registration guarantees you entrance to the April 30th tutorials at NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE for all paid attendees. We will also offer the ever popular hands-on labs. This is a great opportunity to extend your training budget.
This year we will be celebrating the 20th Birthday of the IIUG. Join us for IIUG2015, the Seventh Annual IIUG event.
We are nearing completion of the finalizing schedule for the sessions, hands-on labs and tutorials for IIUG2015. NOTE: All sessions are all listed on the website but are subject to change. Once these items are finalized we will post the full schedule in the website. Look for the email announcing the full schedule.
- Hands-On Labs
- Tutorials
- Over 80 sessions
We are finalizing out keynotes for this year and are pleased to announce Jeff Jonas as one of our keynote speakers. Jeff’s work has received wide media attention from the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Fortune Magazine, MSNBC and National Public Radio. A highly sought after speaker, Jeff travels the globe discussing innovation, national security, and privacy with government leaders, industry executives, and leading global think tanks. He is on the boards of the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and a Distinguished Engineer of Information Systems (adjunct) at Singapore Management University (SMU).
We look forward to seeing you!
The IIUG2015 Planning team
www.iiug2015.org
Apr 26 – April 30, 2015
Marriott Mission Valley, San Diego, California
conference@iiug.org
| Support corner | Back to top |
Finally available, with the 12.10xC5 release, the Informix Server now permits to us to do an upgrade for a high-availability cluster to the next fix pack or interim update (PID) with minimal interruption to client applications. During the rolling upgrade process, the cluster remains online even though the servers in the cluster are running on different levels of the software.
For example, to upgrade from 12.10.xC4 to 12.10.xC5: Stop a secondary server in the cluster, install the new fix pack on it, and then start the upgraded server. After you upgrade all of the secondary servers, stop the primary server and promote one of the secondary servers to the primary server. Then, you can upgrade the original primary server, start it as a secondary server, and then promote it back to primary server.
The rolling upgrade process, as well as prerequisites and restrictions, are documented in the IBM Informix Migration Guide.
Additional information is available in the What’s New in Informix page.
David Jay
| Informix news | Back to top |
Informix Conference Embraces IoT in San Diego
IBM’s Technology Sharing Agreement with Chinese Company Ruffles Feathers in the U.S.
IBM partnership with Chinese company to make US unhappy
Want China Times – March 25
| Informix corner | Back to top |
We’ve gathered the best of the IBM Informix Requests for Enhancement from the past year:
http://goo.gl/forms/awkAdQjNmM
Please indicate which features would be useful to you and your organization. The survey results will be tallied, summarized, and passed on to the IBM Informix Development Team.
| 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 March 2015
UTC/GMT timestamp conversion function for Informix database
Informix does not have a UTC/GMT timestamp conversion function.
Requirement:
- Cast function to convert from a particular datetime to UTC datetime based on the current timezone
- Cast function to convert from sysdate to UTC datetime
Working system-calls from sysadmin tasks with Informix for Windows
Automatic Backup Tasks started from within the sysadmin-scheduler don’t work on windows systems. The same problem with every other system-call. This is a Windows-specific problem. On Linux systems this works as intended.
When executing a DDL statement one can expect the following error message: 106: ISAM error: non-exclusive access
Using the SET LOCK MODE command and placing a exclusive lock on the table will not prevent these behavior.
These error can occur if there are sessions querying the table wit isolation level set to ‘dirty read’.
You can prevent these last one by setting the environment variable IFX_DIRTY_WAIT, that define the number of seconds a DDL statement will wait for existing dirty readers to finish and prevents new dirty readers from accessing the table.
But these don’t prevent someone to try to place a lock using the SET LOCK MODE command and again preventing the table to be altered.
There can be no sessions with open structures on the table.
So we can identify the sessions that have the partition open, we start by getting the partnum of the table in hexadecimal querying the sysmaster:systabname, these action must be done before the DDL statement.
It is also important to get our sessionid before we start to kill the sessions, we can get it by calling DBINFO(‘sessionid’).
Then after the DDL statement get stucked we can check the In-memory address of the RSAM thread control block (rstcb) for the threads that opened the partition, with something like: onstat -g opn | grep -i <hex(partnum)> | awk ‘$8 != 0 {print substr($2,3)}’ | uniq
Then, to get the sessions we have to grep the onstat -u command with the result above.
Clean it to get only unique ids and descarding our session and then killing the sessions through onmode -z command.
Now, in a “wild” production environment it’s a long road to follow.
Here are some features that can be added:
- add sessionid to the onstat -g opn output;
- get the information of the onstat -g opn into a sysmaster table;
- expand the usability of the FORCE_DDL_EXEC to all DDL, as required in RFE 62567.
Add a function to output the cause of information the Remote TMU error 12033
The customer encountered Red Brick Remote TMU Error 12033 occurred. Red Brick Remote TMU Error 12033 message is below. They can’t found cause of the error.
** FATAL ** (12033) TMU Driver could not connect back to TMU Client.
The Error 12033 cause of network problem or Remote TMU client was too busy and could not open the port in time. In this case, please add a function to output the cause of information the Remote TMU Error 12033.
The customer necessary to explain an investigation into Error 12033 occur.
Query on table of 64MB uses over 93 GB of tempspace and fails
Query that is generated by Cognos on a fact table of less then 100.000 rows, 16374 pages of 4KB is running out of temp space. There are 3 tempspaces of 8.192.000 pages of 4KB, in total 93,75 GB of temp space.
Query is not optimally generated by Cognos and contains 80+ count(distinct xxx) clauses. But even then it is not exaplanable that this query does not have enough temp space.
Today we are able to prepare RPM that can be bundle and redistributed as per our requirement. When I do an information rpm query on each individual package I see that the summary and description doesn’t give correct information.
Here is a sample rpm command output for each RPM:
rpm -qip server/RPMS/x86_64/CSCOinformix-server-12.10.FC4W1XK-1.x86_64.rpm
Name : CSCOinformix-server Relocations : /opt/cisco/informix/server Version : 12.10.FC4W1XK Vendor : IBM Corporation Release : 1 Build Date : Thu 05 Mar 2015 12:29:34 PM EST Install Date : (not installed) Build Host : cscolxplat8 Group : Applications/Databases Source RPM : CSCOinformix-server-12.10.FC4W1XK-1.src.rpm Size : 465621193 License : IBM Software License Agreement Signature : (none) Packager : IBM Corporation URL : http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ Summary : IBM Informix Dynamic Server + J/Foundation Description : IBM Informix Dynamic Server + J/Foundation
rpm -qip client/RPMS/x86_64/CSCOinformix-client-12.10.UC4W1X1-1.x86_64.rpm
Name : CSCOinformix-client Relocations : /opt/cisco/informix/client Version : 12.10.UC4W1X1 Vendor : IBM Corporation Release : 1 Build Date : Thu 05 Mar 2015 12:33:26 PM EST Install Date : (not installed) Build Host : cscolxplat8 Group : Applications/Databases Source RPM : CSCOinformix-client-12.10.UC4W1X1-1.src.rpm Size : 210526269 License : IBM Software License Agreement Signature : (none) Packager : IBM Corporation URL : http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ Summary : IBM Informix Dynamic Server + J/Foundation Description : IBM Informix Dynamic Server + J/Foundation
I would like suggest an enhancement change/bug fix for being able to correct this based on a parameter value defined in bundle.properties file
If the description and summary can be customized by defining a variable and value in bundle.properties that is used by ids_install script to create the RPM then we would have better RPM information when a query is run for information against an RPM.
E.g. of bundle.properties that I am using:
[root@cscolxplat8 anavale]# cat csco-server.bundle.properties
# UNIX_INSTALLTYPE_SELECT=RPM IDS_INSTALL_TYPE=DEFAULT # RPM_PACKAGE_BASE_NAME=CSCOinformix-server RPM_PACKAGE_VERSION=12.10.FC4W1XK RPM_PACKAGE_RELEASE=1 # LICENSE_ACCEPTED=TRUE USER_INSTALL_DIR=/opt/cisco/informix/server # CHOSEN_FEATURE_LIST=IDS,IDS-SVR,IDS-EXT,IDS-EXT-JAVA,IDS-EXT-OPT,IDS-EXT-CNV, IDS-EXT-XML,IDS-DEMO,IDS-ER,IDS-CIS,IDS-LOAD,IDS-LOAD-ONL,IDS-LOAD-DBL,IDS-LOAD-HPL, IDS-BAR,IDS-BAR-CHK,IDS-BAR-ONBAR,IDS-BAR-TSM,IDS-ADM,IDS-ADM-PERF,IDS-ADM-MON, IDS-ADM-ADT,IDS-ADM-IMPEXP,IDS-JSON,GLS,GLS-WEURAM,GLS-EEUR,GLS-JPN,GLS-KOR,GLS-CHN,GLS-OT # CHOSEN_INSTALL_FEATURE_LIST=IDS,IDS-SVR,IDS-EXT,IDS-EXT-JAVA,IDS-EXT-OPT,IDS-EXT-CNV, IDS-EXT-XML,IDS-DEMO,IDS-ER,IDS-CIS,IDS-LOAD,IDS-LOAD-ONL,IDS-LOAD-DBL,IDS-LOAD-HPL, IDS-BAR,IDS-BAR-CHK,IDS-BAR-ONBAR,IDS-BAR-TSM,IDS-ADM,IDS-ADM-PERF,IDS-ADM-MON,IDS-ADM-ADT, IDS-ADM-IMPEXP,IDS-JSON,GLS,GLS-WEURAM,GLS-EEUR,GLS-JPN,GLS-KOR,GLS-CHN,GLS-OT # CHOSEN_INSTALL_SET=Custom
Variable and value that I mentioned above would be populated in the bundle.properties like we are currently doing for RPM_PACKAGE_BASE_NAME , RPM_PACKAGE_VERSION, RPM_PACKAGE_RELEASE.
ENABLE ONCHECK DATA CROSS-CHECKING FOR FUNCTIONAL INDEX
oncheck -cI on a functional index still says:
“Non vanilla index. data crosschecking not enabled”
After so many years supporting functional indices we should consider enabling this.
I had a customer with a corruption in a functional index on a huge table that only surfaced when he eventually tried to delete the affected row. He’d like to check this index now more frequently to find other such corruptions and/or to better determine the point in time when such corruption gets introduced.
Enable “Shrink” for indices alone, aside from the “Shrink” for tables
32 and 64-bit Redbrick ODBC drivers certified for IPV6 Protocol
System: Product NITRO
Actor: Users are migrating their VPNs from IPV4 to IPV6 due to which there is a need to certify NITRO for IPV6 protocol.
Description: Nielsen NITRO is desktop application that has capability to connect to red brick databases via drivers using odbc connectivity. As per our testing with Direct Access VPN that supports IPV6 protocol the connectivity to redbrick databases failed while using Redbrick ODBC drivers mentioned below,
Redbrick 32-bit ODBC driver version: 5.63.00.90
Redbrick 64-bit ODBC driver version: 5.63.01.30
Up on further analysis of network traces it was understood that the problem is due to the fact that Redbrick drivers being used are not complaint with IPV6 protocol.
Redbrick ODBC driver Certified for Windows 10
Currently we are using following Redbrick driver version in our application,
Redbrick 32-bit ODBC driver version: 5.63.00.90
Redbrick 64-bit ODBC driver version: 5.63.01.30
We know that the ODBC driver versions mentioned above works on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. But we would like to know a version that is certified for Windows 10 (both 32 and 64-bit Redbrick driver).
Remove the physical storage limitations on Innovator-C
At release of Informix Innovator-C Edition 11.70 xc5, a large number of functionality has been withdrawn ( ER and more), as well as new ressource limitations have been implemented or inreased, such as limitation to 1 CPU vp for instance. We think that many of those limitations are justified and acceptable for a free of charge product.
Nonetheless, we strongly think that the the 8Gb storage limitation is a show stopper and should be removed.
We request the withdrawal of the storage limitation of 8 Gb for Innovator-C.
Gary Ben-Israel
| Calendar of events | Back to top |
| April – 2015 | |||
| Date | Event | Location | Contact |
| 26-30 | IIUG2015 | San Diego, CA | Cindy Lichtenauer |
| 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 ***
- Informix documentation team
- Art Kagel
- Martin Fuerderer
More Blogs and Wikis
- Fernando Nunes
- IDS Experts blog
- Andrew Ford
- Prasanna A M Informix bits & Pieces
- Prasanna A M Informix – Spatial Technologies
- Vaibhav S Dantale
- Eric Vercelletto (In English)
- Eric Vercelletto (In French)
- Sajan Kuttappa
- ognjen.orel
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 |
| 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.
