IIUG Insider (Issue #152) February 2013

Highlights: Revealing Centaurus

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

Friends,

I have 3 requests.

Stay tuned for the Centarus release.

Vote for the IIUG board on the upcoming elections.

Register to the IIUG conference.

Looking forward to meeting you at the IIUG conference in San Diego

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor


Highlights Back to top

Revealing Centaurus

In the March edition I hope to write about a different Centarus which is the code name for Informix 12. But as I am under NDA all I can say for now is expect a great release loaded with new features. Until Informix 12 is officially announced enjoy the following text from Wikipedia about the Centaurus mankind has been admiring since the beginning of history.

Centaurus contains several very bright stars because of its position in the Milky Way; in addition, its alpha and beta stars are used to find the constellation Crux. The constellation has 281 stars above magnitude 6.5, meaning that they are visible to the unaided eye, the most of any constellation. Alpha Centauri, one of the closest stars to the Sun, has a high proper motion; it will be a mere half-degree from Beta Centauri in approximately 4000 years.

Alpha Centauri is a triple star system that contains Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun. Traditionally called Rigil Kentaurus or Toliman, meaning “foot of the centaur”, the system has an overall magnitude of -0.28 and is 4.4 light-years from Earth. The primary and secondary are both yellow-hued stars; the primary, is of magnitude -0.01 and the secondary is of magnitude 1.35. Proxima, the tertiary star, is a red dwarf of magnitude 11.0; it is almost 2 degrees away from the primary and secondary and has a period of approximately one million years. Also a flare star, Proxima has minutes-long outbursts where it brightens by over a magnitude. The primary and secondary have a period of 80 years and will be closest to each other as seen from Earth in 2037 and 2038.

In addition to Alpha Centauri (the 3rd brightest star in the sky), a second first magnitude star, Beta Centauri, is part of Centaurus. Also called Hadar and Agena, Beta Centauri is a double star; the primary is a blue-hued giant star of magnitude 0.6, 525 light-years from Earth. The secondary is of magnitude 4.0 and has a very small separation. A bright binary star in Centaurus is Gamma Centauri, which appears to the naked eye at magnitude 2.2. The primary and secondary are both blue-white hued stars of magnitude 2.9; their period is 85 years.

Centaurus also has many dimmer double stars and binary stars. 3 Centauri is a double star with a blue-white hued primary of magnitude 4.6 and a secondary of magnitude 6.1. The primary is 298 light-years from Earth.

Centaurus is home to many variable stars. R Centauri is a Mira variable star with a minimum magnitude of 11.8 and a maximum magnitude of 5.3; it is 2100 light-years from Earth and has a period of 18 months. V810 Centauri is a semiregular variable.

BPM 37093 is a white dwarf star whose carbon atoms are thought to have formed a crystalline structure. Since diamond also consists of carbon arranged in a crystalline lattice (though of a different configuration), scientists have nicknamed this star “Lucy” after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

IIUG – Election time IIUG Board of Directors 2013

The 2012 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 2013 IIUG Board, a Nominating Committee has been established chaired by former Board Member James Edmiston.

The committee is currently seeking candidates to run for the 2013 IIUG Board of Directors. If you have a passionate interest in Informix products, and the drive, vision, and commitment to lead and represent the world’s most influential community of Informix users, please give your potential nomination serious thought.

Nominations will be accepted until March 4, 2013 and the election will take place shortly thereafter.

For additional info, visit the Annual IIUG Board of Directors Election Information page.

If you would like to nominate yourself or a colleague, please contact the IIUG Nominating Committee by writing to board-election@iiug.org.

James Edmiston
Former IIUG Board Member
IIUG Elections Commissioner 2013


Conference corner Back to top

Learn about Informix Centaururs

Even at $1099 this year’s conference is still the best technical conference bargain on the planet. Those of you who are IIUG members (and that membership is FREE) will save an additional $100 from the above registration rate, but that IIUG Member Discount DISAPPEARS on April 1! Whenever it is that you get off your duff and sign up, you will set yourself up to attend the biggest meeting of the minds in the IBM Informix world. Don’t wait, Register now!

The sessions lined up include deep dive views of “Centaurus,” the still secret (oops, not anymore) “VNext” release of Informix. Several of us on the planning committee have been part of the Early Release program for the new version, and its new features bring Informix major steps forward in popular areas including nearly automatic provisioning and configuration, continuous availability and improved extensibility. Other new topics being covered for the release include the use of Recursive SQL and query transformation in the new release, as well as new indexing techniques being made available.

One major change from previous conferences is that the tutorials, being held on Thursday April 25, are included at NO EXTRA COST for all paid attendees. The tutorials will focus on configuration and performance tuning, but will NOT limit themselves to the latest versions but will also cover older versions of Informix, including those no longer supported by IBM (We all know, and many of us still use, Versions 7, 9 and 10)! The list of tutorials will be posted to the Conference website very soon! Don’t forget to select your tutorials when they become available to reserve your space.

We now have the list of sessions (more to come as we get speaker confirmations) and speakers available for viewing on this year’s Conference website. This impressive list of topics is intended to increase or reaffirm your Informix knowledge and skills. We have several new speakers to the conference as well as many of your favorite speakers from past conferences. All have been gracious enough to share their knowledge with the Informix community.

Don’t forget to check out the sponsors for this year’s conference. When you attend the Conference please visit our sponsors and let them share information on their products and services with you. They may have something you have been looking for!

The Conference Planning Committee is looking forward to seeing some old friends and making new friends this year. Hope we see you there!

April 21-25, 2013
Marriott Mission Valley
San Diego, California, USA
IIUG Conference Planning Committee


Informix News Back to top

Articles

Trusted employees commit more compliance violations than anyone else. Government and industry groups have responded by enacting fraud management regulations designed to protect public and shareholder interests. But your business generates enormous volumes of network traffic every day. Tracking and sifting through all user activity for abuse, misuse, and error can feel like an impossible task. Fortunately, technology exists to help you overcome these challenges

Continuous monitoring is the key to knowing exactly who did what and when – then being able to put that information into context. Take 3 bold steps and start to monitor and manage risk within your legacy mainframe applications, web applications, and across the enterprise. These three steps, deliver the intelligence you need to take informed action for auditing, compliance, and general risk management purposes.

Please download the complimentary White Paper for more information.


Developer corner Back to top

New in DeveloperWorks

28-Feb-2013
Learn you how to connect and use Informix as a data source or a data target with InfoSphere Streams. It covers the use of both the Informix-specific protocol and the more general IBM Common Driver protocol that is used by several IBM database products. After reading this article, a reader will be able to use Informix in a Streams environment

For more information go to DeveloperWorks – Informix.


Support corner Back to top

How to find the application that’s running a particular SQL?

It is not uncommon that an inefficient SQL statement causes overall performance problems. In that scenario, first you need to identify the problematic SQL, next find out the user and application that executing the SQL. Here is a glimpse to address the second part of the problem.

There are different possible ways to find out the user and application running a particular SQL. The ‘onstat -g ses <sessionid>’ command is the simple way figure out the application that running a SQL. Do you notice anything new in the following ‘onstat -g ses <session id>’ output?

First you are creating a procedure under ‘sysadmin’ database named ‘delete_apb_documents_proc()’ that removes all files as ‘apb_document*’ from /tmp directory which were accessed more than 60 minutes ago.


IBM Informix Dynamic Server Version 11.70.FC5 -- On-Line -- Up 16:41:52 -- 1048576 Kbytes

session           effective                 #RSAM    total  used   dynamic
id       user     user   tty pid   hostname threads  memory memory explain
34       informix -      1   19387 garion   1        278528 217656 off

Program :
/usr2/support/products/11.70.FC5/bin/dbaccess

tid      name     rstcb            flags    curstk   status
176      sqlexec  145629268        B--PX--  13103    yield bufwait-

Memory pools    count 2
name         class addr              totalsize  freesize   #allocfrag #freefrag
34           V     145b99040        274432     60064      376        27
34*O0        V     145b0d040        4096       808        1          1

name           free       used           name           free       used
overhead       0          6576           scb            0          144
opentable      0          13880          filetable      0          4312
ru             0          600            log            0          16536

sqscb info

scb              sqscb            optofc   pdqpriority optcompind  directives
142e211c0        145b53028        0        0           0           1

Sess       SQL            Current            Iso Lock       SQL  ISAM F.E.
Id         Stmt type      Database     Lvl Mode       ERR  ERR  Vers  Explain
34         INSERT         stores       NL  Not Wait   0    0    9.24  Off

Current statement name : inscur

Current SQL statement (997) :
  insert into customer
    values(?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?,?)

You are right. There is a new ‘Program’ section in above onstat output. Now, you can use the ‘onstat -g ses <session id>’ command to display the full path of the client program that used in a session. Use the client program information to monitor or control the application access to the database. One thing you should know that the program information is sent by the client itself, and name of the program totally depends on the client.

– Sanjit Chakraborty


Informix corner Back to top

Informix Warehouse Accelerator Bootcamp

Plan now to attend this exciting event.

Would your business benefit from “speed of thought” analysis of warehouse data and/or operational data? If so, you cannot afford to miss this one day, no-cost event to learn about IBM Informix Warehouse Accelerator (IWA): IBM’s patent-pending software technology that exponentially accelerates even the most complex queries. IWA loads data completely into system memory in a compressed form, using a special columnar scheme developed by IBM Research. As queries come in, the Informix database passes them to the Informix Warehouse Accelerator which can scan billions of rows of data in seconds to return immediate results.

Attendees will get hands-on experience with the Informix Warehouse Accelerator technology to create and use in-memory data marts that dramatically and exponentially reduce the amount of time required to execute data warehouse or analytical queries. Business and technical use cases will be presented to show how customers around the world are already using this technology with dramatic business benefits. Attendees will also learn all about the newest capabilities of IWA available with the Informix 12.1 “Centaurus” release!

This session is offered free of charge. Complimentary refreshments, including continental breakfast and lunch will be provided. Participants are responsible for their own business travel expenses.

Registration

Informix Flexible Grid Bootcamp

Save your spot for the upcoming Free Informix Flexible Grid Bootcampafter the IIUG Conference.

Registration


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

I am trying something new on this section. I will first mention the blogs and wikis that have been updated during the last month. Blogs and wikis that have not been updated for over 6 months will be removed.

Blogs and Wikis that have been updated during the last month

More Blogs and Wikis

Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines

  • The IIUG forums
  • Informix Marketing channel on YouTube
  • IBM DATABASE MAGAZINE
  • The Informix Zone
  • There is now an 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. Join here.

 


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
Rhonda Hackenburg

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.