IIUG Insider (Issue #186) December 2015

Highlights: IIUG 2016 Registration Is Open – Early Bird Registration Ends February 4, 2016

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

For me 2015 was a sad year. I hope 2016 will be better. However this editorial is not about me.

It is about Informix. For Informix 2015 was a very good year.

Informix 12.1 was released and is currently at 12.1 xC6. xC6 is not just a fix pack it has big improvements in: Administration, JSON compatibility, High availability, Application development, Performance, Security, Time series data and Warehousing.

2016 is promising.

Let me wish Informix and the IIUG community a wonderful year. I hope to see many of you at the IIUG 2016 in Sawgrass, Florida.

Gary Ben-Israel


Highlights Back to top

IIUG 2016 Registration Is Open – Early Bird Registration Ends February 4, 2016

The IIUG 2016 is by far the most significant event of 2016. In our conference corner we will cover this event monthly.

I hope many of you will attend this event and enjoy the unmatched technical education, networking, meetings with IBM executives, support engineers and Informix developers.

Hope to meet many of you at the Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa.

Gary Ben-Israel


Conference corner Back to top

IIUG 2016 Update

The venue for IIUG 2016 and official hotel is the Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, located in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, just 40 minutes from the Jacksonville Airport. You could also consider flying into Orlando, a 2 hour drive, and extend your trip on either side to visit Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Universal Studios, Epcot or many other attractions in the Orlando area.

A limited number of rooms have been blocked for IIUG 2016 attendees at a special rate of $189 per night. This rate include complimentary internet in your room as well as a shuttle that will take you to the Sawgrass Beach Club (The shuttle is normally $25). Attendees will also find discounted rates for parking if you have a vehicle. Hotel booking instructions will be provided with your IIUG 2016 registration confirmation.

The IIUG 2016 Planning committee met at the Sawgrass in December to review and select this year’s speakers. During that time we met with the hotel event planner and began planning for this Informix packed event. The hotel and grounds were beautiful in December, I can only imagine how beautiful it will be in May. The Sawgrass will have their best face on for our event since they will be hosting one of the PGA’s premiere events, The Players Championship, the following week.

Register by February 4, 2016 to receive the early bird discount. The early bird price will save you $275.00 off the regular price. IIUG members who register online by May 5, 2016 will receive an additional $100.00 off this price.

Paid registration includes full access to IIUG 2016 from May 4 – 8 (Wednesday evening – Sunday afternoon) including breakfast and lunch each day, the Wednesday evening reception and admission to IIUG party on Thursday evening, May 5 and Friday evening, May 6. Optional tutorials are INCLUDED for Sunday May 8, 2016 to PAID* attendees. IIUG 2016 kicks off Wednesday, May 4th at 7:00 PM, with the Welcome Reception and will end Sunday, May 8th at 5:00 PM, after the tutorials.

Session selection notifications will soon be sent to all speakers and we are currently waiting for return confirmations. Keep watching the conference website at http://www.iiug.org as our speakers confirm the information will be added to the website and you can begin your planning.

If you have any questions, please contact the IIUG 2016 Committee at conference@iiug.org.

Hope to see you in May!

IIUG Planning Committee


Support corner Back to top

We are all in this Together

The end of the year is upon us. More features are on hand in IDS 12.10, and IBM is honored that we have customers that continue to love Informix, and remain intensely loyal. Inside the support organization, we have watched as additional IBM products have embraced Informix Dynamic Server as an underlying structural part of a larger IBM portfolio.

As I thought about this process of inclusion, it reminded me about a feature that came along as of 12.10.xC4, known as “multi-tenancy”. Not only is Informix part of the larger IBM product set, it also is neatly able to separate organizations that use Informix Dynamic Server, under a single roof. Consider for a moment that you are a tenant in an apartment building. Your apartment is solely yours for tenancy. You do not share a room or storage; you do not share resources like heat or utilities, or become limited just because other tenants move into the building.

Conceptually, this is similar to the idea of multi-tenancy in an Informix 12.10 database. As owner of the Informix software, you can assign database resources to organizations just like tenants in an apartment building. You can control resources that are available for each tenant that relate to tenant database size, memory usage, and CPU usage. Additional properties are available in the tenant definition when you run the admin() or task() SQL administration command with the tenant create or tenant update arguments.

For more information on this concept, check out what is documented in the IBM Informix Administrator’s Guide and the IBM Informix Administrators Reference.

Happy New Year from your Informix Support Team!

– 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.

Please also note that now on we can see the last comments of the IBM Lab about each RFE, and its status now appears clearly.

Register here

(Login at DeveloperWorks to see the RFEs.)

New RFEs for December 2015

The activity has been rather low this month. We can see that the Backup from RSS or HDR server is again progressing. Some other interesting features are also requested. To be followed next month.

Headline Status Votes
dbimport support for tenant databases (81079) Submitted 2
Need dead connection timeout parameter (81283) Submitted 1
Top 16 RFEs (By number of votes)
Headline Status Votes
In-Place Alter for varchar, lvarchar and boolean Under Consideration 38
Backup from RSS or HDR Secondaries using ontape, onunload, onbar, dbexport Under Consideration 33
SQL interface to obtain the temporary space usage (tables, hash, sorts…) Submitted 28
Implementation of regular expressions (adding to LIKE/MATCHES functions) Under Consideration 21
Request to track and save a time stamp for last time an index was used. Nee… Submitted 20
Obtain the query plan of a running query Under Consideration 18
Implement CREATE OR REPLACE option for stored procedures Under Consideration 17
ALTER owner of database objects after creation Submitted 14
Backup Individual database, not entire instance Submitted 12
Include the regexp datablade into the Informix product Submitted 10
Enable defined limits on sqltrace Under Consideration 9
SQL to identify TEMP tables from current session (36245) Under Consideration 9
Enable HDR Secondary to perform archives Submitted 8
The function LENGTH () also for BLOBs / CLOBs (41823) Submitted 7
Clone a database Under Consideration 6
Show percentage complete on ontape restore (72063) Submitted 6
Option to get a warning if strings are truncated during an insert (33830 Under Consideration 6

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.

Gary Ben-Israel


Informix corner Back to top

Videos

Eric Vercelletto – IIUG Board Director discusses the Informix warehouse Accelerator, IoT and more

IBM Champion Art Kagel shares his views on what makes Informix the most powerful database

Raghu Nambiar – Distinguished Engineer – talks about Cisco- IBM partnership


Informix News Back to top

TechTarget: Vendors’ cloud partnerships not always an IT blessing


Calendar of events Back to top

May – 2016
Date Event Location Contact
4-8 IIUG 2016 Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, at Ponte Vedra Beach. Florida conference@iiug.org

 


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

  • Eric Vercelletto (In English)
  • Eric Vercelletto (In French)
  • Prasanna A M Informix bits & Pieces

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

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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.
Editor: Gary Ben-Israel

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

 

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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.