Highlights: Informix Administration Certification Transition Announcement

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 Informix community.

Editorial

With daily missile attacks on Jerusalem and the Passover holiday it is hard for me to find time for the Insider. However, I hope you will find this issue of the Insider helpful. 

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor
IIUG Board of Directors
gary@iiug.org  

The unveiling of Informix standalone contain has been announced.  Join Daniel Weber during April’s Tech Talks on Thursday, April 30 at 1:00 pm EDT to learn more.  You don’t want to miss this.

There is a great article on Informix Smartblob Primer from Tom Beebe.

Informix 15 badge will soon be ready.  The highlight section includes information regarding the “new” badge process. Stay tuned for future information on this as it becomes available.

The Call for Speakers is now open for IBM TechXchange 2026, October 26-29, 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.  Please submit your proposals for this year’s event.  Don’t forget, IBM is still offering a 40% discount to register for this event.

Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Insider Co-Editor
IIUG Board of Directors
rhonda@iiug.org  

Highlights

• The Informix Administration Certification for v14 is being retired and will no longer be available going forward.
• The new IBM Certified Informix v15.0 Database Administrator – Professional certification will become the primary and supported credential for professionals seeking to validate their Informix administration expertise.
• This updated certification validates skills in key areas such as installation, configuration, security, performance tuning, backup and recovery, high availability, and troubleshooting in Informix v15 environments.
• The transition reflects the advancements and enhancements introduced in Informix v15 and ensures that certified professionals are equipped with the most current knowledge and skills.

• Updated product features and functionality in Informix v15
• Enhanced administrative and automation capabilities
• Improved support for modern deployments, including hybrid and cloud environments
• Current best practices for performance, scalability, and high availability

Anup Nair 
IBM

Conference Corner

IBM TechXchange Conference 2026 – Call for Session Now Open!

IBM TechXchange 2026

October 26 – 29, 2026

Atlanta, Georgia, USA 

Submit your session today!

Key Dates: 

• May 22 – Submissions due
• June 30 – Acceptance notifications sent

Receive a 40% discount to IBM TechXchange 2026 if you register now.

NOTE: You will be taken to the IBM sign in page to register and submit your session for this event.  You must have an IBM account for this event. There is a link on the page to create your IBM account.

Stay tuned for future updates!

Invite colleagues to join us at IBM TechXchange 2026!

We can’t wait to see you in Atlanta in 2026!
#IIUG #IBMTechXchange #Informix

Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Board

Informix Corner

Introducing the IBM Informix Standalone Container: Cloud-Native Freedom for Informix v14 & v15

IBM is excited to unveil the Informix Standalone Container, a major advancement in the modernization journey for Informix customers. Designed for seamless deployment on Kubernetes (K8s) and Red Hat OpenShift (OCP) without requiring Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D). This new offering brings unprecedented flexibility to enterprises adopting cloud-native architectures.

With fully supported, production-grade container images for Informix v14 and v15, organizations can now integrate Informix directly into their DevOps workflows, scale across hybrid-cloud environments, and run containerized workloads on public cloud or on-prem infrastructure. This expansion strengthens Informix’s position in the cloud-native ecosystem and aligns with the growing demand for modern, platform-agnostic deployment models.

Read the full article in the blog:  https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/anup-nair/2026/03/17/ibm-informix-standalone-container

Anup Nair
Principal Product Manager – Informix

Informix Smartblob Primer

One of the more frequent headaches for Informix DBAs is dealing with Smartblobs (BLOB/CLOB). They are powerful storage pieces to handle binary data. However, they have a special set of ways to handle working with them. Unlike other datatypes you can’t just directly store content in them, you have to handle them from files on disk or through the IO system.  

 If you have not worked with them before, they offer some advantages over traditional “Dumb” blobs (BYTE/TEXT). These include the ability to have them logged which allows use in replication. They also can be handled in part rather than reading the entire file at once. You also can easily load them from a file on disk. You are able to keep metadata on them to track things like the last accessed date. One other big advantage is they can store up to 4tb of data. You also can round robin store the data between multiple smartblob spaces. 

To set up the engine you need to create a smartblob space. To do this use the onspaces command with the -c -S flags. By default the space will be unlogged and automatically set up the space inside of the smartblob space to store the metadata. There are some flags you may want to set when creating the space: 

• -Df buffering=ON  – Use the normal buffer pools rather than a separate memory pool just for smartblobs 
• -Df ACCESSTIME=ON – Track the last time a smartblob is accessed 
• -Df LOGGING=ON – Log the smartblob space, this can be changed later on if needed 
• -Df AVG_LO_SIZE=<size> – Give a general idea of what size the average object will be, this can help storage efficiency  
• -Ms 150 – The size of metadata, in K, the more objects you have the more metadata space you need, if you run out of metadata space it will block writing to that space 

onspaces -c -S sbspace -p /cooked_space/sbspaces -o 0 -s 1000000 -Ms 10000 -Df “AVG_LO_SIZE=5K,LOGGING=ON,ACCESSTIME=ON” 

Once you have done that, change the $ONCONFIG parameters of SBSPACENAME to define the default smartblob dbs and SBSPACETEMP as the default temp space when dealing with smartblob objects. 
At this point the engine is good to go to start working with smartblob fields. You can create them as normal columns of types BLOB or CLOB. One note is that by default they will go to the SBSPACENAME space, if you want them in another space(s) use the PUT flag.  

CREATE TABLE test_smartblob  ( serial_id serial, blobfield BLOB) PUT blobfield in (sbspace1); 

You can list multiple sbspaces in the PUT command, it will use them round robin.  
Note: as for all Round Robin fragmentation,   if you alter the table to change the PUT location it will not change prior records, it will only use those spaces for new fields 

Now, how to access those fields. There is a main set of functions to handle the fields.  
To load data use the functions FILETOCLOB and FILETOBLOB. You pass them the same way with the parameters of FILETOBLOB(“file_to_load.txt”, “server or client”);  
Where in this case if you define the second field as ‘server’ it will pull the file from the Informix server filesystem and if you set it to ‘client’ it will pull and upload the file from the client system.  

insert into table_a (image_data) values (filetoblob(“/tmp/latest_image.jpg”,’client’)); 

update table_b set latest_log = filetoclob(“/var/log/syslog”, ‘server’) where logname = ‘syslog’; 

To copy a smartblob object to another record use the LOCOPY function. Note that this creates a pointer to a file, not a separate file. 

INSERT INTO students_2026  (photo) SELECT LOCOPY(photo) FROM students:students_2025; 

To retrieve a file you use the LOTOFILE function. This works the same way as FILETOBLOB where you pass LOTOFILE(field_name, “output_file.txt”, “server or client”);  
Note however the output file by default will have a suffix of the internal object. So in this case it would write the file “output_file.txt.30cf2” 

select lotofile(user_image, ‘user_image.png!’, ‘client’) from users_table where user_id = 3; 

select lotofile(latest_tos, ‘/var/www/html/tos.html!’, ‘server’) from web_docs where doc_type = ‘tos’;  

If you want to change the naming scheme you can use ‘?’ in the filename to have it add in hex values to help keep the filename unique. While if you use a ‘!’ in the filename it stops at that point. So setting it to “output_file.txt!” will write out just ‘output_file.txt”  
One of the common headaches with it is there is not a direct way to get the size of a smartblob object. IBM/HCL has you covered here. There is a datablade called ‘excompat’ that adds additional functionality.  
If you need to add it to a database you need to register the datablade: 

execute function sysbldprepare(‘excompat.*’, ‘create’);  

It will add a set of additional functions. A full list can be found at: 
https://help.hcl-software.com/hclinformix/1410/dbxt/ids_dbxt_530.html 

The function that I find most useful is the dbms_lob_getlength function, which works just like you think it would. If you run it with dbms_lob_getlength(column) it gives the size in bytes of the record.  
One note with excompat. Make sure you are running version 1.2. Up to date Informix versions will have this bundled in $INFORMIXDIR/extend/excompat.1.2, if you are running an older version you may want to verify. There is a bug in version 1.1 and 1.0 where smartblob objects > 2gb will return ‘0’ for the length, it may also impact other functions from the extension with files over that size.  
One unofficial trick is if you are running an older version of informix you can get the updated extension from a newer system and it should be backwards compatible, just put it in the $INFORMIXDIR/extend directory.  

Note that Informix only stores a pointer to the smartblob object in the BLOB/CLOB field, not the actual file, which is why everything is stored in smartblob spaces and there is not an in-table storage option like there is with TEXT/BYTE. 

With all of that, smartblobs provide powerful features inside of Informix that add a great deal of flexibility when dealing with binary data. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to get started with them, however they can be a vital part of an advanced Informix environment. 

Tom Beebe 
xDB Systems

Informix Tech Talks on YouTube – Thursday, April 30, 1:00 EDT

Upcoming Informix Tech Talks

Title: Standalone Containers
Date: Thursday, April 30, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM EDT
Speaker: Daniel Weber

Description: Discussion on the new IBM Informix standalone containers including a demo on how easy it is to upgrade from the Developer Edition to an entitled edition (i.e. Enterprise Edition).

Bio: Daniel Weber is Informix Container Development Lead.

 REGISTER HERE

Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Board

Last Informix Tech Talks Replay

Replay of the Last Informix Tech Talks: March 2026 – An Amazon-style B2B e-commerce application fully powered by Informix by Xavi Escoté Llopis

Informix Tech Talks YouTube Channel

Our YouTube Channel now has:

• 592 subscribers (8 new subscribers)
• 120 videos (1 new video)
• 26,975 views (288 additional views)

Informix Tech Talks YouTube Channel Videos

Past Informix Tech Talks Replays

In Search of Tech Talks Speakers

We are looking for additional speakers and especially any new speakers to share your Informix knowledge with our user Community via the IIUG Tech Talks. We will assist you in preparing for your Tech Talks presentation by prerecording your session. This will allow you to be available to answer any questions that come up in the chat during your presentation.

If you are interested in producing a 15 – 45-minute presentation, please contact either Art Kagel or Bruce Simms for additional information.

Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Board

Informix Training

Free Informix Tutorials Videos – a step-by-step approach to using Informix Database Servers is available at https://advancedatatools.com/tech-info/informix-tutorials/

2026 Update to Informix Badging Process

The Informix v15 Certification is almost ready 

The Informix v15 Certification is almost ready. The ETA we have received for GA is end of March / early April. We completed the final workshop today to finalize the exam questions, and the certification is now going through the publication process. 

As you know, this certification will be administered by the IBM Certification team with the support of third-party testing providers. Depending on the geo the fee ranges from $100-$200. 

Anup Nair 
IBM

RFE Corner

IBM has an RFE – Request For Enhancements website.

Please visit the RFE site to vote for your favorite enhancements and place new requests. It is friendly and has a nice look and feel.

Recent

Support Informix for Ubuntu 24.04 

Add TCP_NODELAY as a CSDK Parameter 

Make scroll cursors more consistent when lists/collections are involved 

Popular 

Informix should be able to change owner on tables and any other objects (110 votes)

Backup Individual database, not entire instance (95 votes)

IBM Informix Forum Corner

Join and visit the IBM Informix Community Forum

Recent Posts:

onstat -x and sysmaster:systrans 

Informix 15 compatibility mode 

AXIS2C removed from 4GL 

IDE 15.0.1.0 : JDBC could not open database table  

Informix 15.0.1.0 Time Limited Trial Downloads 

Informix 15 questions 

How to decode value of ifx_replcheck 

Lowest log sequence numner on transactions VS lowest log 

Serial and pseudo-rowid values going negative 

Is there an easier way to tell if a table was built “with rowid” 

ancient Informix product – Perform 

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Board

Informix Resources

IIUG Website
Not a member? Become an IIUG member and keep updated on all things Informix. It’s free.

IBM Informix Community
Not a member, join the IBM Informix community and connect with other Informix data experts.

Blogs / Newsletters

Art Kagel – https://informix-myview.blogspot.com/

Mary Schulte – ACTIAN https://www.actian.com/blog/databases/user-friendly-external-smartblobs-using-a-shadow-directory/

Gerd Kaluzinski – German Informix Newsletter – NEW!!

IBM Informix RFE

IBM Informix RFE – Informix Requests for Enhancements.

Technical Articles

Oninit Group
WAIUG (Washington Area Informix User Group) Tech Tips
Over 10 Years of Informix Webcast Replays
Over 30 Years of Informix Blog Posts

Social Media

IIUG’s own Art Kagel was recently features on the Tech Sharmit Podcast to talk about his life and involvement with Informix and database systems.
Catch the podcast here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l81pLa7i-J0)

Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines

Informix Marketing channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/informixmarketing?feature=results_main

Closing and Credits

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 exceeds 25,000 entries and enjoys the support and commitment of IBM’s Information 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 or rhonda@iiug.org