Highlights: IBM has received a Software Excellence award for Informix from Cisco
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
- Highlights
- Conference corner
- Support corner
- RFE corner
- Informix corner
- Informix news
- Calendar of events
- Informix resources
- Useful links
- Closing and credits
| Editorial | Back to top |
We have successfully passed three Jewish holidays: Rosh Hashanah, our new year; Yom Kippur and Sukkot. So I had little time for editing the Insider. I promise to work harder next month.
If you will look at the conference corner you will find valuable information about the Informix sessions at the IBM Insight. So if you are going, take a hard copy so you do not miss them.
Gary Ben-Israel
| Highlights | Back to top |
IBM has received a Software Excellence award for Informix from Cisco
IBM has received a Software Excellence award for Informix from Cisco (every year for past 3 or so years, Cisco has spent $10-12 million on Informix licenses to embed in their solutions. This is 90% of Cisco’s annual IBM software purchase).
This recognition definitely strengthens IBM’s position with re-sellers and VADs, especially those that are in the Informix business. The award speaks to IBM’s commitment to developing strong collaboration with our strategic partners such as Cisco, to continuously deliver the high quality solutions that lead to high customer satisfaction.
For about a decade, Cisco has relied on Informix core strengths to embed in various Cisco Collaboration solutions. IBM’s relentless attention to customer and partner satisfaction and leading technology innovation are critical success criteria for Cisco.
During the award ceremony Cisco publicly recognized that the IBM team went well above and beyond by:
- adding Cisco test suites to the Informix releases so that each release can be fully tested before the customer gets their hands on it
- working closely with Cisco to simplify both business and contracts models for increased speed and efficiency through the procurement process
- achieving a 100% score in software quality, which includes response times
- regularly and openly advising Cisco on 3rd Party and open-source applications included with Informix
| Conference corner | Back to top |
Informix — The next generation database platform for IoT
Mark your calendar to learn about the latest Informix developments. During these sessions, you will hear directly from:
- Customers, Partners and IBM thought leaders on how IBM helps to deliver a lower cost, high performing and more reliable solution out of the box
- Session Preview tool
- Session Overview
- IBM Business Partner
- Sponsors & Exhibitors
Meet with Insight 2015 customer speakers and leverage their experiences all week!!
For more information, contact:
Gary Procter: gproctor@us.ibm.com
Rajesh Govindan rajesh.govindan@in.ibm.com
Data Management Keynote — Meeting the challenges of ground to cloud data management:
Monday, October 26th, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM, Mandalay Ballroom
Roadmap — Informix
| Session Number | Date | Time | Room | Title | Speakers |
| DMX-2620 | Mon, 26-Oct | 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | IBM Informix Strategy and Technology Roadmap: Capitalizing on Growth Opportunities | Richard Wozniak – IBM |
| DMX-2050 | Mon, 26-Oct | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Security Best Practices for Informix | Jonathan Leffler & Nagaraju Intuiri – IBM |
| DMX-1995 | Tue, 27-Oct | 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Next Generation IoT Analytics Service Enable Fast IoT Application Creation | Sheng Huang & Yaoliang Chen – IBM |
| DMX-3145 | Tue, 27-Oct | 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Leveraging Computational Power at the Edge: IoT/M2M Solutions With Informix in the IoT Gateway | Robert Andres – Eurotech |
| IOT-3239 | Tue, 27-Oct | 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Banyan A | IoT for the Shopping Malls of the Future | Josh Cooper – Hildebrand & Kevin D. Brown – IBM |
| DMX-1043 | Tue, 27-Oct | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Highly Successful Performance Tuning of an Informix Database | Brad Price – Werner Enterprises |
| DMX-2350 | Wed, 28-Oct | 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Informix on ARM and Informix TimeSeries: Producing an Internet | Mike Walker – Advanced DataTools |
| DMX-4071 | Wed, 28-Oct | 11:30 AM – 12:20 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 1-Meet the Experts – Forum 2 | Meet The Experts: IBM Informix, Internet of Things, Embedded DB and More | Kevin D. Brown, Scott Lashley, Shawn Moe, John F. Miller III – IBM |
| DMX-1768 | Wed, 28-Oct | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Managing Internet of Things Data on the Edge and in the Cloud with Intel and IBM | Preston Walters – Intel & Kevin D. Brown- IBM |
| DMX-3256 | Wed, 28-Oct | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | SCADA Systems and Cloud Based Solutions: Monitoring Dated Equipment | Kevin D. Brown – IBM |
| DMX-2904 | Thu, 29-Oct | 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Developing Hybrid Applications With Informix: Your Data Model Should Not Restrict Data Access | Erika Von Bargen & Shawn Moe – IBM |
| DMX-2628 | Thu, 29-Oct | 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Always On: High Availability Best Practices for Informix | Scott Lashley & Nagaraju Inturi – IBM |
| DMX-2649 | Thu, 29-Oct | 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 3-Palm A | Informix Operational Database and Streaming Analytics with Spark | Kenneth Myers – IBM |
| Hands on Lab | |||||
| LCD-1139 | Mon, 26-Oct | 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 1 Bayside F – 13 | Hands on with Multi Tenancy in IBM’s Internet of Things Engine | Carlton Doe – IBM |
| LCD-3177 | Tue, 27-Oct | 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 1 Bayside F – 05 | IoT Foundation on IBM Bluemix: Build an End-to-End Application to Evaluate Sensor Data | Alexander Koerner & Andreas Weininger – IBM |
| LCD-1141 | Wed, 28-Oct | 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 1 Bayside F – 13 | IBM TimeSeries Service Hands-on Lab: Integration of NoSQL and Time-Oriented Data | Carlton Doe – IBM |
| LCD-3119 | Wed, 28-Oct | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Mandalay Bay South Convention Center Level 1 Bayside F – 07 | Application Development Using a Hybrid Database | Shawn Moe & Bingjie Miao – IBM |
IIUG 2016 Speaker submission will soon be open
Now you know where IIUG 2016 will be held, Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
And, you know when IIUG 2016 will be held, Wednesday, May 4 – Sunday, May 8, 2016.
It’s time to start thinking about what you want to present at IIUG 2016. The Planning Committee is always interested in getting some great topics for this exclusive Informix event.
IIUG 2016 is all about Informix, but is not limited to Informix. There are many products and technologies that work well with Informix. You may have a solution using one these technologies that others would appreciate learning about. Or, maybe you are doing something innovative with Informix that you want to share with our attendees. This is your opportunity to share your knowledge and experiences to help others who may be looking for new ways to use Informix to improve their business strategies.
If you are interested in presenting at IIUG 2016 and can’t think of a topic you can always contact the IIUG 2016 Team for help.
Look for the submission announcement towards the end of October 2015 or you can keep updated at IIUG 2016.
We will also be opening registration for IIUG 2016 about this same time. As you think about registering for IIUG, please remember we have reserved a limited number of rooms at the Sawgrass Marriott for this event. So you might want to consider booking soon before these rooms are gone. We will not be able to help you if you don’t reserve a room at this top rate Resort.
Several of our attendees like to incorporate other activities with their IIUG event. If you are looking to extend your trip it may help you to know that Mickey, Minnie and all of their Disney friends are only a short 2 hour drive from Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort and Spa. You could extend your trip by flying into or out of Orlando. Why not rent a convertible and enjoy the drive in the beautiful Florida sun.
So, keep watching for the announcement for Speaker submissions and IIUG 2016 registration openings.
We look forward to seeing you at IIUG 2016.
IIUG 2016 Planning Committee
| Support corner | Back to top |
Over many weeks, support has noted an increase in the number of installation questions, perhaps because of a change in the command line options available during installations. On the Informix Dynamic Server 12.10, we have made improvements by way of better logging and debugging options, and easier silent installations.
The default name and location of the installation log file for either the database server or client products has changed to /tmp/iad_act.log (UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X) or \tmp\iad_act.log (Windows). You also have the choice to specify a different name and location for the installation log file with the -DLOG_FILE option in the installation command.
The -DDEBUG option is being dropped. Instead, we allow for tracing levels (1-9) that use the ‘-DEBUG_LEVEL’ option in the installation command. If tracing is enabled, the default name and location of the debugging file is /tmp/iad_dbg.log (UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X) or \tmp\iad_dbg.log (Windows). You can set the name and location of the debug file with the -DDEBUG_FILE option.
Click here for more information on what’s new.
– David Jay
| RFE Corner | Back to top |
Just in case you are not aware, some time ago IBM created a public website to collect the requests for new features directly from users. The RFE (Requests For Enhancements) website is included in developerWorks. You can access it here.
Once you logged in with your usual IBM ID, choose “Information Management” in the Brand dropdown box and “Informix Servers” or “Client Products” in the Products dropdown box.
The interesting thing is that any request, including your request, if you place one, are submitted to be voted on. This means the RFEs that receive more votes have a greater chance to be considered by the architecture and development teams for further consideration. In other words, this IS the opportunity to provide enhancement ideas even if you are not the biggest IBM customer on the planet Earth.
Some RFEs will be of great interest, others will not seem useful to you. This is why your opinion is important. Do not hesitate to vote and place comments!
The idea of the RFE corner is to provide a digest on new Informix RFEs and make those RFEs more visible and accessible for the community, so that you can vote for them in a faster and easier way. By participating actively in this website, IBM will have solid and useful elements from the customer base to introduce new functionality to Informix product.
Please also note that now on we can see the last comments of the IBM Lab about each RFE, and its status now appears clearly.
Register here.
(Login at DeveloperWorks to see the RFEs.)
New RFEs for September 2015
The activity has been rather low this month. We can see that the Backup from RSS or HDR server is again progressing. Some other interesting features are also requested. To be followed next month.
Print session info for long transaction in msg log or DUMPDIR
Votes: 2
When a long transaction fires, the only informix in the online.log file is the transaction number and not much more that would enable the DBA to quicky find the guilty transaction. Request to list the guilty session number in the online.log and eventually in onstat -g sql and onstat -x
INFORMIX Servers Management table Auto Repair Tool
Votes: 1
Request to implement automatic system catalog repair, because it takes a long time on large servers
TS Rolling Window Containers dropping dormant window should be similar to D…
Votes: 2
This is related to how Time Series can use the rolling window container. Defaut behaviour is that once the dormant fragment is removed, it has gone forever. If one wants to keep the data somewhere, the only solution is to unload it or insert into another table. Request the possibility to choose between drop or fragment detach, just like ALTER FRAGMENT DETACH does.
Enable HDR Secondary to perform archives
Votes: 3
Is a duplicate of “Backup from RSS or HDR Secondaries using ontape, onunload, onbar, dbexport”: simply vote for it instead of the current one
A Java JDBC program has a problem with displaying the content of column “fe…
Votes: 1
The feprogram column in syssessions / onstat -g ses does not show correcly when the client is an additional java thread. This is probably a product defect and should be logged as a PMR.
Customer requesting JSON data type support in 4GL
Votes: 1
Request to have the possibility to DEFINE BSON/JSON datatype in Informix 4GL
Top 13 RFEs (by votes)
| RFE Abstract | Status | Votes this month | Votes last month | Evolution |
| Backup from RSS or HDR Secondaries using ontape, onunload, onbar, dbexport | under consideration | 29 | 21 | ++ |
| Implementation of regular expressions (adding to LIKE/MATCHES functions) | under consideration | 19 | 17 | + |
| Implement CREATE OR REPLACE option for stored procedures | under consideration | 16 | 15 | + |
| Add constant to centralized Key of ER Consolidation Model | submitted | 12 | 11 | + |
| Improve performance of L1/L2 backups | submitted | 11 | 9 | + |
| ALTER owner of database objects after creation | submitted | 10 | ||
| Backup Individual database, not entire instance | submitted | 8 | ||
| Enable defined limits on sqltrace | submitted | 6 | ||
| CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW | submitted | 6 | ||
| Clone a database | under consideration | 5 | ||
| suppress fast repeating event from running alarmprogram for each event | submitted | 5 | ||
| Implement Oracle “Flashback Database and Restore Points” | submitted | 5 |
Do not forget to vote for one or several of those RFE’s if they fit your requirements. The more vote, the more chances that the Dev Team will seriously consider the request.
You can access each RFE by clicking on the above links. At the bottom of each RFE page you will find a hyperlink to vote for it. You will see the Request stats, including number of votes for this request, on the right side of the request page. The more votes, the greater the chance an enhancement will be addressed by the Development Team, taking into consideration the general interest.
Take some time to examine the full list and vote for the enhancements you would like to see implemented.
Eric Vercelletto
| Informix corner | Back to top |
IBM will be hosting an IoT event in Sao Paulo, Brazil on Oct 16th. Stay tuned for further details.
| Informix News | Back to top |
IBM builds toward next phase with IoT push
Top 10 Enterprise Database Systems to Consider in 2015
ServerWatch
Northwest Nazarene University
IBM partnership with Chinese company to make US unhappy
Want China Time
| Calendar of events | Back to top |
| October – 2015 | |||
| Date | Event | Location | Contact |
| 1 | 2015 Informix Roadshow | Atlanta, Georgia | Carlton Doe |
| 25-29 | IBM Insight2015 | Las Vegas, Nevada | |
| Informix resources | Back to top |
http://www.informix.com or directly at: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/
Blogs and Wikis that have been updated during the last month
- PlanetIDS: Blogs, Videos, News and more *** Up to date feeds from many blogs ***
More Blogs and Wikis
- Informix documentation team
- Eric Vercelletto (In English)
- Ben Thompson’s blog ****New****
- Art Kagel
- Fernando Nunes
- ognjen.orel
- Martin Fuerderer
- Eric Vercelletto (In French)
- Just Dave Info *** Informix and other products ***
Forums, groups, videos, and magazines
- The IIUG forums
- Informix Marketing channel on YouTube
- IBM Data Magazine
- Credentials, the IBM Certification Newsletter
- The Informix Zone
- 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.
| Useful links | Back to top |
| 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. |
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| Editor: | Gary Ben-Israel |
For comments, please send an email to gary@iiug.org.
