IIUG Insider (Issue #133) July 2011

Highlights: Informix Dynamic Server 11.70.xC4 Early Validation Program 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 IBM Informix community.

Contents:

 

Editorial Back to top

I wonder sometimes if in the era of social networks and blogs there is still a place for an old fashioned newsletter. I am advertising many blogs in the Insider. I visit them all. By the number of visits and comments not many of you do the same. Please do. There is a great deal of interesting stuff in them.

On one hand I would like to see more blogs, on the other hand it becomes harder to follow. Without a good search capability many great technical articles posted in blogs are not available to you when you actually need them. I am sorry to say the same about the Insider. We have been promised a Web 2.0 site with search capabilities. I have lost my patience and am planning to post all technical articles from the past few years and put them on our site with an Index that will let you find things easily.

Will presence in social networks and blogs help marketing Informix? I have no idea. The beauty of it is you can never tell. In Israel a post on Facebook started a movement that is shaking the country. I joined tonight a 15,000 people march in Jerusalem which was one of several marches across the country. It is encouraging to see young people getting out of the cyberspace and into the real world and making a difference. I doubt many of you are interested in Israeli internal affairs. But I wrote about it just to say that we have the power to change things, so keep up your good work and let’s all hope it change things eventually.

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor

Highlights Back to top

Informix Dynamic Server 11.70.xC4 Early Validation Program Announcement

We are pleased to announce the Informix Dynamic Server 11.70.xC4 managed Early Validation Program (EVP), which is now open for customers to submit nominations – the nomination process is described below.

This will be a closed EVP test with a limited number of participants. Participants will be expected to actively engage in testing and provide timely feedback on the EVP releases. You might also have the opportunity to participate in early product usability studies.

Program objectives

The objectives of this Informix Dynamic Server 11.70.xC4 EVP are:

  • To validate product acceptability (functionality, usability) with key customers and gather input for this and future releases
  • To validate General Availability (GA) readiness
  • To provide direct customer input to development, marketing, and sales
  • To identify early adopter reference accounts

Key Features

Nominations for the Informix Dynamic Server 11.70.xC4 EVP program, are welcome from both existing and new customers, particularly those who have an interest in testing solutions for matters such as the following:

  • Eclipse based TimeSeries Loader Plug-in Completion
    Provide users with a graphical interface to specify custom file formats for import/export of data to/from the database. A graphical user interface suitable for non-programmer user needs so that data in flat files can be imported and exported to/from the database.
  • Integrate OpenAdmin Tool (OAT) in the CSDK installer
    OAT will be integrated into the Informix CSDK and Connect product installs. Customers will be able to get support for OAT.
  • OpenAdmin Tool (OAT) ER plugin – multi-byte support
    This update, any feature in ER environment that uses multi-byte can be supported in OAT. This will provide support for replication between unicode supported and non-unicode systems, thus allowing the customer to roll-out the migration to unicode and to replicate to/from differing codesets. This will enable OAT to support multi-byte replicates (with same locale) in Flexible Grid

Program Schedule

These are planned dates, however please note that they are subject to change, as planning progresses. (Dates subject to change)

Nominations required by Aug 12, 2011
Customer “Kick Off” call including education Aug 15, 2011
Code Shipment Aug 15, 2011

Support

The following support will be provided during the beta program:

  • Education: Will be provided as part of the formal beta “kick off” meeting. Please see the schedule above for dates, with further details later.
  • Documentation: All documentation will be provided in electronic format.
  • Service: Advocate will be assigned to answer questions

Participant Selection Criteria

  • Willingness to accept the terms of an Early Projects legal agreement and a code license agreement
  • Agreement to participate in status calls and provide regular feedback
  • Ability to work with English versions of the product and publications
  • Willingness and ability to apply resources to testing the EVP code
  • Willingness/ability to configure an environment to utilize and test the product
  • Compliance with the EVP product prerequisites

Nomination Process

To nominate yourself for the Informix Dynamic Server 11.70.xC4 managed Early Validation Program (EVP), please send email to Anita McKeithen expressing your interest in participating in this program.

The manager for this program is:

Anita McKeithen
Informix Beta Manager
mckeithe@us.ibm.com
913-599-7171 – work
816-721-3140 – cell

If you have any queries concerning this beta program and the nomination process, please contact any of the above.

Conference corner Back to top

IIUG Members save $100 on Information On Demand Global Conference 2011

Turn Insight into action at the Information on Demand 2011 global conference October 23-27, 2011 at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas Nevada. Experience proven technologies and meaningful business insights to improve performance while reducing costs. Choose from three technical forums that give you in-depth education including hands-on labs and usability sand boxes, and the thought-provoking forum for Business Leadership.

Registration is now open for IOD 2011 and being a privileged member of the IIUG, you can get a discount of $100 by using the Discount Code G11IIUG, which has been exclusively created for the IIUG members. In addition, take advantage of the Early Bird Registration discount of $300. That’s a total savings of $400if you register before August 31, 2011. Don’t miss out – Register today!

http://www.ibm.com/software/data/2011-conference

Education Back to top

FASTEST Informix DBA Training from Lester Knutsen and Art Kagel

Advanced DataTools

As IT professionals, we are constantly asking ourselves how can we do our jobs better? How can we improve the database systems for which we are responsible?

Do you wonder how taking advantage of Informix’s Timeseries, Geospacial, and custom designed data types might help your projects soar but don’t know how to get started? Have you wondered how to leverage your existing 4GL source code into modern graphical, web based, and mobile applications? Can the Informix Flexible Grid feature improve the security, safety, and performance of your databases? Is there any way to reduce our storage costs? How can we leverage our existing databases and perform complex Decision Support queries without affecting our production applications and without the complexity of setting up and maintaining a separate Data Warehouse?

Advanced Datatools has to expertise to help you evaluate all of the new features in Informix version 11.70 and to make best use of the features and facilities you have available to you. Call us to arrange a free consultation conference with one of our experts. We have the experience to recognize opportunities for improvement that you may have been passing up.

For information and to register visit http://www.advancedatatools.com or call (703) 256-0267 Ext.101

FASTEST Informix DBA Training
from Lester Knutsen and Art Kagel Advanced DataTools

September 26-29, 2011 – Advanced Informix Performance Tuning Course (attend online or in person)

This course is for database administrators and application developers who will be responsible for managing, optimizing, and tuning an IDS database server. The focus is on skills, procedures, and scripts to improve the performance of your database server. The course will provide a toolkit of scripts and utilities to start monitoring and optimizing your IDS database server.

Do you want to learn how to be the FASTEST Informix DBA? This is the course our Fastest Informix DBA contest was developed from, and it will increase your database performance tuning skills.

This 4-day course focuses on techniques for optimizing an Informix Database. Labs will demonstrate more than 100% performance improvement. Each student will have a 4-core Linux server with Informix 11 and a large dataset for benchmark exercises and labs. Attend the class in person or online via our Web Training Center. Both Art Kagel and Lester Knutsen will be teaching the Advanced Classes together.

For information and to register visit http://www.advancedatatools.com/Training/InformixTraining.html or call (703) 256-0267 Ext.101

Developer corner Back to top

Informix Chat with the Lab

Topic: All about Informix Private Server and Mapped Users
Date: Tuesday, August 25
Time: 8:30 AM Pacific
10:30 AM Central
11:30 AM Eastern
4:30 PM London
5:30 PM Frankfurt, Paris
10:00 PM India

In the 11.70 release, Informix has introduced the ability to install and run as a “Private Server”, i.e. without access to user root or user informix. Since running as an unprivileged user makes OS authentication of users impossible, IDS has also introduced the concept of “Mapped Users”. This allows creation of users that are not necessarily known to the OS. Note that “Mapped Users” is not restricted to “Private Server”.

Watch for the announcement of this upcoming Chat with the Lab at the new Informix Chat with the Lab home page on DeveloperWorks:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/ifmxchatwithlab/Home New in DeveloperWorks

What’s new in Informix MACH 11 high-availability features for secondary servers
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-1107mach11cluster/index.html
IBM Informix Version 11.50.xC6 brought several enhancements for Informix multi-node active clusters for high availability, called MACH 11. In this article, get an overview of some of the new features, such as the ability to stop or suspend replication in the Informix cluster environment, and the capability to perform an external backup on a remote standby secondary server. You’ll also learn how to avoid blocking checkpoints on primary servers in a high-availability data replication (HDR) environment. The article includes detailed steps for implementing the new enhancements, as well as explaining how they work. A frequently asked questions section at the end will answer any lingering questions.

21 Jul 2011

Recommended practices for using Cognos with Informix, Part 2: Deploy Informix with IBM Cognos BI Server 10
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/tutorials/dm-1106cognosinformixpart2/index.html
Connecting your Informix databases to IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software gives you a way to unleash the power of your data with expanded query, reporting, and analysis capabilities. If you’re ready to take that step, this two-part tutorial series gives you the information you need to install, configure, and deploy the necessary components to achieve the best results. Part 1 showed how to get started with using IBM Cognos Express V9 together with IBM Informix V11.5 as a content store and data source. In Part 2, you’ll get the same level of detail for deploying Informix with IBM Cognos BI Server V10. The tutorials include recommended practices for each step along the way, based on lessons learned from real-world deployments on the Windows operating system.

Also available in: Portuguese

7 Jul 2011

Evaluate: IBM Informix Growth Edition
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/im/informixgrowth/index.html
Informix Growth Edition provides powerful data management capabilities for departmental solutions or small-to-midsized businesses. It supports up to two cluster nodes of any type and unlimited replication nodes to send or receive data updates from other nodes in the grid. I also allows unlimited data storage.

6 Jul 2011

Evaluate: Informix Express Edition
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/im/dsexp/index.html
A trial download is not available for Informix Express Edition. However, you can access it on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. In addition, you can download several editions of Informix 11.7.

Also available in: Chinese Portuguese

5 Jul 2011

For more information go to DeveloperWorks – Informix: /url/devworks.html

Database Master 4 for Informix Database

Database Master is a modern, powerful and easy to use IBM Informix client application, with a consistent interface that simplifies managing, querying, editing, visualizing, designing and reporting database systems.

Using Database Master, you can execute SQL, LINQ, JSON queries. You can create, edit and delete all database objects such as tables, views, procedures, columns, indexes, collections and triggers. Database Master provides powerful and intuitive SQL, LINQ and JSON query editor. It supports code highlighting, Intelli Sense and text find/replace features. You can export data into most popular file formats like XML, HTML, CSV, MS Excel, MS Word, MS PowerPoint Open Office Calc and Writer, RTF, PDF, XPS, JSON and dBASE.

You can also export whole database data and structure (Table, View, and Procedure) as a SQL Script. Database Master also supports MongoDB, DB2, SQLServer, Oracle, Ingres, PostgreSQL, MySQL, FireBird, SQLite, ODBC and OleDb connectios.

For more info: http://www.nucleonsoftware.com

Informix news Back to top

Article

Managing Time Series Data with Informix
Article on DBTA by Vaibhav Dantale ( IBM’er )
http://bit.ly/DBTATimeSeries

Case study

Coldset Printing Partners
The IBM Informix TimeSeries solution helps company track usage trends and analyze data over time
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/JHAL-8J8P8L?OpenDocument&Site=dmmain&cty=en_us

Support corner Back to top

Reserve memory for prevent out of memory situation

MOut of memory is an undesired state of any database operation where no additional memory can be allocated for use by database. Historically, the out of memory condition is more common in embedded environment, where database server configured to run in low memory configuration. The out of memory situation may lead to database server hung or abnormal outage. Informix introduced a new mechanism to efficiently handle the out of memory situation. It provides more control over the database configuration in low memory condition. Now you can reserve a specific amount of memory to allows Informix to continue with critical database activities even in out of memory situation. Examples of some critical activities are event logging, rollback operation etc.

Use the LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE configuration parameter to reserve a specific amount of memory in kilobytes for use when critical activities are needed and the server has limited free memory. For example:

  LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE 512

You can also dynamically adjust the value of the LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE configuration parameter with the onmode -wm or -wf command.

No matter how the LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE configuration parameter is set, the maximum size of reserved memory is 20 percent of the value of the SHMVIRTSIZE configuration parameter. By default, the LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE is set to 0, which means disabled. If the value is less than 128, the following messages are displayed:

            Warning: LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE= incorrect. Must be 0 or 128K
            to 20% of the first segment size

Look for the last two lines in the onstat -g seg command to monitor the LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE value. The first of these lines shows the size of reserved memory in bytes. The second of these lines shows the number times that the server has used this memory and the maximum memory needed.

onstat -g seg command output:
id         key        addr     size       ovhd     class blkused  blkfree
6782345    52804c01   44000000 133652480  1006264  R     32627    3
6782759    52804c02   41276000 131072000  769136   V     17181    14819
Total:     -          -        264724480  -        -     49808    14822

   (* segment locked in memory)
Virtual segment low memory reserve (bytes):4194304
Low memory reserve used 0 times and used maximum block size 0 bytes

The online.log also displays appropriate messages each time low memory reserve change. For example:

Value of LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE has been changed to nnn.

The low memory reserve is one of the many features that introduced in Informix version 11.70.xC3.

– Sanjit Chakraborty

Informix corner Back to top

Informix Bootcamp

Informix Warehouse Bootcamp

  • 26 Sep – 27 Sep – Berlin, Germany

For more details and registration:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/im/Informix+Warehouse+bootcamp

Informix Performance Tuning Bootcamp

  • 30 Aug – 01 Sep – Cali, Colombia
  • 13 Sep – 15 Sep – Kaula Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 18 Oct – 20 Oct – Sao Paulo, Brazil

For more details and registration:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/im/Informix+Performance+Tuning+Bootcamp

Informix 11.7 Bootcamp

  • 15 Aug – 17 Aug – Sydney, Australia
  • 15 Aug – 17 Aug – Manila, Philippines
  • 20 Sep – 22 Aug – Ehningen, Germany
  • 1 Nov – 3 Nov – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

For more details and registration:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/im/Informix+11.7+Bootcamp

2011 Informix Technical Roadshow

  • 2 Aug – 3 Aug – Minneapolis, Minnesota

For more details and registration:
/url/technical_roadshow.html

Informix resources Back to top

Informix blogs and things

Calendar of events Back to top
August – 2011
Date Event Location Contact
2-3 Informix 11.7 Technical Roadshow Minneapolis, Minnesota
October – 2011
Date Event Location Contact
23-27 Informix on Demand 2011 Las Vegas, Nevada

 

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

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.