Washington Area IBM Database User Group - News and Information

Informix IDS 11 (Cheetah) Tech Day

October 30, 2006

by Nick Nobbe

IBM hosted a well-attended, day-long get together of our local Washington Informix User Group at the IBM Bethesda, Maryland, site. The day was focussed on the latest and greatest release of IDS, 11.10, dubbed "Cheetah", the most feature-full release to date, and highlighted a few of the most salient features.

Gary Proctor, IBM Channel Marketing Manager from Lenexa, led off the meeting with an encouraging review and preview of the Cheetah/IDS marketing and development effort. Basically, thanks to the direction of Arvid Krishna, cross fertilization between the DB2 and IDS r&d arms, and a devoted user community, IDS has been experiencing double-digit percentage growth. Encouraged by the momentum, IBM is planning on a forthcoming "point" release with a slew of additional features and improvements. And the good news is that on the marketing front, IBM will be promoting placement of special IDS/Informix banner ads, coming soon to the web. Keep your eyes peeled.

Vijay Lolabattu from R&D, Menlo Park, and Dave Desautels, Lenexa, covered a few of the most radical improvements and extensions that should relieve the DBA of a lot of janitorial chores, and make daily life easier, safer, and more interesting. Vijay covered autonomic and manual tuning improvements (checkpoints, recovery time, LRUs, AIO-VPs, and direct IO with cooked dbspaces) and the new web administration control panel. Dave covered enhancements in replication, always a solid part of IDS but now flourishing in a dazzling array of permutations (ER, HR, secondary servers, remote standby secondaries ...). He also gave a glimpse at workings of the newly added label-based access control security features, a huge improvement in security.

All in all, it was a very full day, with still enough time for meeting old friends, talking to the speakers, and even enough to eat and drink. Thanks to our local master of ceremonies Warren Heising, IBM, for hosting the meeting, and to Cindy Lichtenauer of the IIUG for her support scheduling the speakers and not least the free special developer edition of Cheetah (IDS 11.10) and other goodies.

Presentations

Overview of IDS “Cheetah” - New features, results of the beta test run, and a roadmap of the future.
AGILE – Performance enhancements in Cheetah, application development - Deliver peak performance to your applications.
AGILE – IDS an Agile Choice for Application Development - Take advantage of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to deliver location based information to your applications.
INVISIBLE – Enter the “Administration Free Zone” - IDS is well known for 'hands-free' reliability. The new OpenAdmin Tool provides a GUI based view of all of your data server activities - starting with a map of server locations that can drill down to the detail of an individual SQL statement. Other features allow automatic scheduling to keep your weekends free.
RESILIENT – Availability Solutions in IDS “Cheetah” - Learn how customers achieve 99.999% availability (less than 5 minutes downtime/year), improved performance, and easy scalability.
RESILIENT and SECURE – Protecting your Information Assets - New security features, including Label Based Access Control (LBAC) help protect information assets. New levels of control will make it easier to isolate protected information to meet regulatory compliance requirements and gain competitive advantage.

Forum 2006 - December 8-9, 2006

The Washington Area Informix User Group (WAIUG) based in Washington, DC, and the Southeast Informix Users Group (SEIUG), based in Atlanta, GA, have teamed up once again to present Informix User Forum 2006. This is the premiere Informix regional user group technical conference in the world. This is a user conference planned and run by Informix users for Informix users.

For more information, and a list of sessions, presentation downloads, pictures, and soponsors, visit the Forum 2006 Home Page .