IIUG Insider (Issue #140) February 2012

Highlights: – Elections for IIUG Board of Directors 2012 will start March 19

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

In March we will have elections for the IIUG Board of Directors. The current IIUG board met for February 24-26 in Orlando Florida. For me it was a long flight followed by two and a half days of meetings and then a long flight back.

Not really over the Jetlag.

Being a board member is a lot of work. The community is unaware of the individual roles. Nevertheless, your support is important. Please vote for the board members you find worthy.

We are hoping you will see some positive changes to our website real soon. So stay tuned.

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor


Highlights Back to top

Elections for IIUG Board of Directors 2012 will start March 19

The 2011 IIUG Board of Directors is a diverse group of users, partners and IBM employees from all over the world. The current IIUG Board will complete its term soon. In preparation for the upcoming election of the 2012 IIUG Board, a Nominating Committee has been established chaired by former Board Member James Edmiston.

For additional info, visit: /about/election.php.

The election will be officially announced March 5th and will start March 19th.

Stay tuned.


Conference corner Back to top

2012 IIUG Informix Conference Update

The 2012 IIUG Conference promises to be one our best conferences to date. We will still have a full day of tutorials, over 80 sessions, hands-on labs and of course several of your favorite speakers. But in addition, the conference will feature two new tracks and several new and exciting speakers. If you miss this year’s conference, you’re going to be missing a lot.

How about sessions on Windows Active Directory, achieving single sign on via LDAP for Informix on Unix? That’s a lot of tech speak, but that gets your users logged in quickly, with less hassle, and fewer phone calls to you! Then there’s the session on using Informix on your Android device. Yup that screen may be small but it’s big enough to get access to your data, as well as your instance configuration. Learn how at the conference. There is a session on migrating FROM Mysql TO Informix. What a concept! Another session will detail how to integrate the open source tool Python into your Informix toolkit. In addition to sessions detailing the many warehouse features available with Informix, you will also be able to learn about Basic Text Search, an enhancement which allows use of, and fast access to, very large text fields which are becoming more and more common in today’s data structures.

Don’t forget the excellent tutorials that will be offered this year. For a nominal fee you can learn more about Informix Warehouse Accelerator. Get some hands-on experience with the new and exciting technology. We all experience performance issues why not try solving performance issues and other problems from a Holistic or whole system concept. Don’t have an Informix Disaster Recovery (DR) plan or not sure if your DR plan is adequate? Check out our tutorial that will help you develop the best DR plan for your organization.

How about an entire track dedicated to IBM Genero and its 4GL application modernizing! Something we have never done before at an Informix conference is an entire Business Track. This year we have one. So bring your management, as well as your application developers! Don’t forget to check these out.

Some of this year’s speakers include: Noa Bar-Yosef, Tom Beebe, Nadir Doctor, Carlton Doe, Bharat Gera, Tom Girsh, Mark Jamison and Art Kagel. We also have Lester Knutsen, Scott Lashley, John Miller, Jack Parker, Mark Rees and Paul Watson. This conference has just so many great speakers you will find it hard to choose.

This is just a VERY small sampling of what this year’s conference has to offer and there is so much more. To see the complete list of sessions, tutorials and all things conference related please visit /conf.

Register today to take part of this technology packed conference.

See you April 22 – 25 in San Diego!

John Fahey and Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Conference Planning Committee


Education Back to top

Informix Training – Online, Onsite or in Our Classroom

Advanced DataTools Corporation has release our Informix training schedule for 2012. Art Kagel and Lester Knutsen will be teaching the Classes. This is your opportunity to learn from the best Informix DBA’s in the Informix community. Attend the class in person or online via our Web Training Center.

The follow is a link to the courses on our web site.

http://www.advancedatatools.com/Training/InformixTraining.html

Informix Course Schedule by Advanced DataTools (attend in person or online)

All courses may be taken online on the web from your desk or at our training center in Virginia.
All you need is a web browser and a SSH client (like Putty) to connect to the lab machines in our office.

March 5-8, 2012 – Informix for Database Administrators.
This course is for database administrators, programmers, and technical support personnel who will be setting up, managing, and tuning IBM Informix 11, 10, or 7 databases.

May 21-24,2012 – Informix Advanced Enterprise Replication.
This is a new course under development.

June 25-28, 2012 – Advanced Informix Performance Tuning
This course is for database administrators and application developers who will be responsible for managing, optimizing, and tuning an Informix 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 Informix database server.

September 10-13 2012 – Informix for Database Administrators.
This course is for database administrators, programmers, and technical support personnel who will be setting up, managing, and tuning IBM Informix 11, 10, or 7 databases.

December 3-6 2012 – Advanced Informix Performance Tuning.
This course is for database administrators and application developers who will be responsible for managing, optimizing, and tuning an Informix 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 Informix database server. (Cost $2,000 USD)

Registration Information:

http://www.advancedatatools.com/Training/CourseRegistration.html or Call 703-256-0267 x101 for more information and to Register

Informix Warehouse Accelerator and Pentaho BI Webcast

Advanced DataTools Informix Warehouse Accelerator and Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence Webcast

April 10, 2012

Pentaho is the open source business intelligence leader. Thousands of organizations globally depend on Pentaho to make faster and better business decisions that positively impact their bottom lines. Advanced DataTools is certified and we can help you implement an open source business intelligence solution. The Pentaho BI Suite provides a full spectrum of data integration and business intelligence (BI) capabilities including ETL, OLAP, query and reporting, interactive analysis, dashboards, data mining and a BI platform that has made it the world’s most popular open source BI suite. Pentaho’s platform also provides broad enterprise data services including integration with Hadoop for Big Data analytics and support for the company’s Agile BI initiative, which enables organizations to build BI applications more quickly, respond to business changes more easily and expedite time-to-value for up to 90% less cost than traditional BI vendors.

More Information coming soon!

Register for the Webcast here!

http://advancedatatools.com/Informix/IWAWebcasts.html

Contact us for more information and to discuss your unique Informix database needs:

Call: 1-800-807-6732 x101
Email: info@advancedatatools.com

Genero Training

Get the new and latest IBM Genero Education and Training courses online here: http://t.co/d5yQWEgq


Developer corner Back to top

Informix Chat with the Lab

Topic: Informix Flexible Grid Technology
Date: Thursday, Mar 22, 2012
Time: 8:30 AM Pacific
10:30 AM Central
11:30 AM Eastern
4:30 PM London
5:30 PM Frankfurt and Paris
10:00 PM India

Informix Dynamic Server(IDS) is well known for its fastest performance and most reliability, but accessing the data stored on IDS from clients also relies on the performance of hardware and operating system. This presentation will focus on how Informix takes care of some abnormal scenarios due to unpredictable random system events that can cause a database connection request or SQL request to take longer than expected, including slow networking speed and heavy system load. Through this presentation, the audience will learn how Informix handles the slow performance caused by something outside of Informix by taking advantage of the following features in different scenarios:

Presented By:
Jerry Keesee – Director, IBM Informix Database Development (IBM)
Madison Pruet (IBM)
Mahesh Dashora (IBM)

Informix 11.7 database software is designed to help our customers cut costs, and speed the deployment of critical business solutions while boosting performance. One of the key themes of this new release is Flexible Grid. This feature gives our customers the flexibility to scale data management across regional or global clusters while mixing different hardware and operating systems which translates into cost reduction for business operation. The Informix Flexible Grid keeps data available to applications at all times, even during planned maintenance and upgrades, without the need for temporary hardware. This easy-to-deploy and manage innovation lowers operating costs by reducing the need for new hardware, and reducing administration time up to 80%.

Come and join us for this Event.

Presentation material will be available at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/ifmxchatwithlab/Home prior to the event.

Register for this event at http://bit.ly/x7FxKb

For questions about this event, contact the host at: mckeithe@us.ibm.com.

New in DeveloperWorks

Please do check out the Informix smart meter central wiki on developerWorks which is dedicated to The smart meter support, created By Jacques Roy (IBM)
http://t.co/FIzcamUQ

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

FreeInformix

A complete analysis of TimeSeries:

http://www.freeinformix.com/timeseries.html


Informix news Back to top

The Secret of Informix

IBM Champion and IIUG president, Stuart Litel, revealed the secret of Informix in a recent interview. He also discussed how he started using “this thing called Informix”, and what’s in store for the April IIUG conference.

http://bit.ly/AlCcup

Database scalability for popular SaaS application

Informix port delivers unlimited database scalability for popular SaaS application.

http://t.co/gkQpzVsY

IBM Academic Initiative

Early adopter of cloud technologies : Spotlight on Dr. Praveen Rao (Assistant Professor of Computer Science Electrical Engineering University of Missouri-Kansas City).

http://ibm.co/xPCeuY

Informix Business Partner Newsletter – February 2012

Editor’s Corner

At the outset, I wanted to quickly highlight about the BP forum on the IIUG which was created for you. This is an exclusive community created for Business Partners like you to collaborate, network, communicate with the IBM Informix team, the IIUG members and peers. We need you to join this community and stay connected and participate in the discussions to leverage each other’s experience and benefit from it.

This forum is only visible and accessible to business partners who sign up for it. Membership is open to any IBM Informix business partner (we will verify your business partner status) and you must also be an IIUG member. To sign up for access, please email Ted Wasserman (tedwas@us.ibm.com) or Gary Proctor (gproctor@us.ibm.com) and provide the main email address in your IIUG member record, or the SIGs email address in your Member record (under the Membership button). You will be sent a confirmation email when your access has been approved.

/forums/bizpartner/

So what is in store for you this month? This edition is packed with some key happenings, interesting articles, details on Webcast, upcoming events which you can leverage. Do utilize it and let us know if you have any requirements on what you would like to see or hear about in the near future.

Before I sign off, I do want to thank you for your comments, suggestions and thoughts. It was really wonderful and helpful and we are working on incorporating those. Keep those thoughts, feedback, wins, and customer references coming in!

Best wishes,

Sapna Muralikrishnan
Informix Channel Marketing Manager

Informix helps businesses of all sizes around the world save money and grow
Bernard Spang or Bernie as he is best known to IBMers has a wealth of experience in IBM. He is the Director, Strategy and Marketing, Database Software and Systems in IBM and this is what he had to say about Informix in his blog and in a recently held IIUG event in India.

“I have found that most people in the database software arena have no idea how much Informix software continues to helps organizations of various sizes and industries around the world. Since I started this blog as a means to communicate both my views on database software and systems, and the truths about this part of the IBM portfolio, I believe it is incumbent upon me to do some education on this subject.”

Bernie goes on to talk about some of the success stories we have had in the recent past and how businesses across industries are benefitting tremendously with Informix. To read more about this, visit Bernie’s blog at http://louistcherian.wordpress.com/2011/11/.

IBM Informix goes to the University; Learned by over 4K students and still counting
Meet Dr. Mirta Baranovic, Head of Applied Computing Department, School of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.

What is the connection between Dr. Mirta Baranovic and Informix?
Dr. Mirta Baranovic started developing a passion for Informix in the early eighties, bringing Informix to the University of Zagreb and using it as the basis of her database courses. In fact, more than 4,000 database students have taken her classes over the years.

When asked “why Informix?” her reply is simple = “love at first sight”. She gives a lot of credit to the architecture of Informix which in her words .brilliant and modern.. From an academic’s point of view, there is another compelling reason for liking Informix, the fact that the concepts in Informix are clear and simple, and a student can easily grab those concepts. And thanks to the way Informix is built, it requires little or no effort to run.

To read more about how Informix is being evangelized at the Unversity, visit Louis’ blog.

Informix India Annual User Group meet, 2012
We had the first Informix India Annual User Group meet in Mumbai, India on February 16th 2012. This event saw the coming together of some of the top executives for Informix. Stuart Litel – President, IIUG, Jerry Keesee – Director, Informix Product management, Bernard Spang – Director, strategy and marketing, Rajesh Nair – Product Manager, Informix, Rachael Rusting – Director, IBM graced this event and contributed to making this a big success.

This first of a kind user group in India was attended by partners, prospects, customers, students and technology specialists. The entire day was packed with sessions on value propositions of Informix, deeper dive into the technology, road maps, sessions by Informix Business partner etc., This forum reinforced to the user group about how important Informix is to IBM and what they could look forward to, in the future.


Support corner Back to top

Effectively working with Informix Servers on AIX

There are several variables that you need to consider for Informix to work on the AIX platform. We will take a quick look into the recommended installation levels, APARs, and known issues regarding the interaction between Informix and the AIX operating system that can affects Informix’s performance. It is possible additional AIX APARs that are unrelated to Informix activity but may impact Informix databases. It is recommended that you consult the following AIX fix distribution site to search for other AIX APARs which could impact your system:

http://www.ibm.com/eserver/support/fixes/fixcentral/main/pseries/aix

Recommended Minimum AIX Technology Levels
The recommended minimum technology levels are minimum levels. Unless otherwise indicated, higher Technology (TL) or Service Pack (SP) levels are recommended. The prerequisite levels in the standard Informix product documentation are the minimum levels required for support and do not change after the product becomes generally available; the recommended minimum levels presented in this document deal with issues discovered after the product became generally available. Following these recommendations can result in increased system stability and reliability.

Recommendations for running Informix 11.70 on AIX

AIX version Recommended minimum AIX technology levels
7.1 7100-01-02
6.1 6100-07-02

Recommendations for running Informix 11.50 on AIX

AIX version Recommended minimum AIX technology levels
7.1 7100-01-02
6.1 6100-07-02
5.3 5300-12-05

Recommendations for running Informix 11.10 on AIX

AIX version Recommended minimum AIX technology levels
6.1 6100-07-02
5.3 5300-12-05

Recommended Minimum AIX Firmware Release
It is important to maintain the most current version of firmware release to avoid known and fixed issues. You can access the firmware download list by providing your machine type and model number form following address:
http://www.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/Downloads

AIX APARs which Affect Informix Server

AIX 7.1 APARs for Informix servers

APAR# AIX APAR Description TL Comments
IZ94610 IO ON J2 AIO FASTPATH MAY CAUSE A HANG FOR SPARSE FILES 7100-00-03 I/O hang
IZ92383 TCP_NODELAYACK CAUSES EAGAIN ERROR ON SORECEIVE 7100-00-03 Indicators are 25582 and 25580 errors.

AIX 6.1 APARs for Informix servers

APAR# AIX APAR Description TL Comments
IZ91171 FAIL TO SEND SIGIO WHEN AIO J2 FASTPATH IS TAKEN 6100-06-04 I/O hang
IZ94663 IO ON J2 AIO FASTPATH MAY CAUSE A HANG FOR SPARSE FILES 6100-06-05 I/O hang
IZ85844 TCP_NODELAYACK CAUSES EAGAIN ERROR ON SORECEIVE 6100-06-05 Indicators are 25582 and 25580 errors.

AIX 5.3 APARs for Informix servers

APAR# AIX APAR Description TL Comments
IY83580 64-BIT RTL ENABLED APPLICATIONS FAIL WITH ERROR 0509-036 5300-04-02 exec(): 0509-036 Cannot load program
IY93737 INFORMIX COMMAND DUMPING CORE 5300-08 oninit fails with IOT/Abort trap

Known issues for Informix servers running on AIX

Issue Comments
APAR IC80345 (not published yet)
11.50.xC9W1 ALLOWS USER WITH WRONG PASSWORD TO CONNECT
A replacement for each PID is available on Fix Central. 11.50.UC9W1X1 replaces 11.50.UC9W1 and 11.50.FC9W1X1 replaces 11.50.FC9W1.

– Grant Flander


Informix resources Back to top

Informix blogs and things


Calendar of events Back to top

Upcoming Events:

Partnering for Growth – IBM and You on Tuesday March 13, 2012 from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM PDT

Explore the newest IBM Informix data server capabilities that can power your next generation solutions. Five great reasons to attend:

  • Hear from IBM experts on new Informix capabilities that are powering next generation solutions in areas such as analytics, smart meters, cloud and data virtualization
  • Learn and explore through real use case scenarios, customer proof points, demos and proof of technologies
  • Learn about extensive ISV and Business Partner offerings, including key resources available to you
  • Meet and network with IBM thought leaders

Free Lunch!

Venue: IBM North San Jose Facility, CA
4400 N First Street
San Jose, CA 95134

IBM Informix Genero Bootcamp on Thursday, April 26, 2012 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM (PT), San Diego, CA.

Join us at the IBM La Jolla facility in San Diego, CA for an Informix Genero Bootcamp with IBM and Four Js experts. This is a no cost, concentrated workshop that enables you with skills to modernize your legacy 4GL applications and develop new applications for virtually any platform. You will learn how to identify new market opportunities and enhance character-based applications into an exciting and engaging visual interfaces!

Register here: http://bit.ly/zru5YK

March – 2012
Date Event Location Contact
12-14 Informix Performance Tuning Bootcamp Vienna, Austria
22 Washington Area Informix User Group – One day TimeSeries Lab IBM, Tyson’s Corner Virgina Lester Knutsen – lester@advancedatatools.com
April – 2012
Date Event Location Contact
10 Informix Warehouse Accelerator and Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence Webcast Lester Knutsen – lester@advancedatatools.com
22-25 IIUG Informix Conference San Diego, CA Cindy Lichtenauer – cindy@iiug.org
24-26 Informix 11.7 Bootcamp Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia IBM – swgbp@my.ibm.com

 


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.