IIUG Insider (Issue #185) November 2015

Highlights: Ardenta wins Analytics award at IBM Insight

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

For those that celebrated Thanksgiving I hope you had a great one. Where I live we are way passed our holiday season and things are pretty calm. Relying on Informix at my company does means life is very calm at work as well. At least from the database perspective.

So I took my time searching for some new Informix stuff.

I was disappointed to see that there is nothing new in Developerworks since October 2014. It used to be a great source let’s hope it will be again in the future. For old articles you can still here

Gary Ben-Israel


Highlights Back to top

Ardenta wins Analytics award at IBM Insight

IT service provider demonstrates value-add to enterprises in a data-powered culture.

The UK-based provider of Informix expertise Ardenta have been awarded the esteemed Informix Business Partner of the Year award by IBM at the annual Insight summit held in Las Vegas on 25th October. Each year at Insight, IBM acknowledges those business partners who stand out because of their outstanding growth and performance, marketing activities, solutions and deep expertise. Of the 17 companies who were awarded for their respective areas of expertise in IBM Analytics solutions, 3 were UK-based, supporting the UK’s reputation as exporting world-class technical skills.

As members of the International Informix User Group (IIUG), Ardenta has competed and won on their technical skills, so to receive the Informix business Partner of the Year award is a great achievement not only for the technical teams but for the entire business. The business remains focused on and committed to ensuring that Informix clients realize the outcomes and efficiencies which the software solution brings to the enterprise. Ardenta’s customers span diverse industries, each with their individual business challenges but with a shared requirement for high performance business-critical functions at all times. The dedication to Informix is clear: Ardenta has some of the most skilled Informix specialists in the world in its team of experts, and finds innovative ways to add value as resellers. Their unique offer of Informix in the cloud, adds a further layer of convenience, speed-to-market and efficiency.

Ardenta has an Informix client portfolio which includes major online entertainment operators such as Ladbrokes, Gala Coral, Betfair and William Hill, as well as major media companies such as BBC, ITV, Local World and Trinity Mirror.

“I’m honored that Ardenta has achieved this endorsement from IBM, and thrilled that our growth as Informix resellers has again been recognized worldwide,” says Neil Truby, MD of Ardenta. “Although our technical expertise has developed alongside every new version, we have really cemented our Informix base in the past year, and delivered significant business results for our clients,” he reveals.

What does the future hold for a key Informix partner, and for its clients?

“As data emerges as the new currency, being capable of quickly translating this into insights and actions without huge costs and time constraints is going to be fundamental to the future of every business, but especially those whose business-critical operations take place online. Future-proofing your technology investment critically means ensuring that you have ready access to specialists who can support you. I would urge anyone who uses Informix to reach out to us for introductions, as it is rare for us not to be able to unlock performance and hidden value in our clients’ infrastructures,” Truby challenges. “What matters most to us is continuing to serve our customers and helping them to use Informix to see through business challenges”, he concludes.


Conference corner Back to top

IIUG 2016 Registration is Open

IIUG 2016 will be held in a new location this year, at a place we have never been before. Join us May 4 — May 8 at the Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, at Ponte Vedra Beach. Florida. This resort is an oasis with golf, surf and sunshine galore. Sprawling over 65 acres, the resort combines contemporary accommodations and an amazing selection of dining options with a spa, meeting space and 99 holes of championship golf.

As a guest of the resort, you can enjoy access to the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, one of the PGA Tour’s most venerable courses. You can rent kayaks, paddleboards or enjoy other ocean activities at the Cabana Beach Club, take a break at the resort-style swimming pools, spend time at the fitness center, there are bike rentals, a volleyball court, jogging/fitness trail and a miniature golf course on-site. Click here to learn more about our new venue.

The IIUG 2016 Planning Committee will be meeting in December to review and select the content and speakers for this exclusive Informix event. We have received many great abstracts to choose from. If you submitted a proposal, you will be hearing from a CPC member by the end of December. As far as content goes, here is an idea of what you can expect:

  • Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning
  • IWA
  • TimeSeries
  • Internet of Things
  • NoSQL/JSON
  • Cloud (ER, HDR/SDS/RSS)
  • Security
  • IBM Bluemix
  • Sensor Data
  • Developer Topics
  • Hands on Labs
  • Sunday Tutorials (Full and Half Day)

Once we receive confirmation from our speakers we will start to list the sessions on www.iiug2016.org for you to start making plans.

Tentative schedule, please note the change in days that you are accustom to from previous IIUG events:

  • Wednesday – Welcome Reception
  • Thursday – Breakfast and Lunch, AM Keynote, Conference Sessions including Certification Testing Review, Hands on Labs, PM Event/Party
  • Friday – Breakfast and Lunch, AM Keynote, Conference Sessions, Hands on Labs, PM Event/Party
  • Saturday – Breakfast and Lunch, Conference Sessions, Hands on Labs, No PM Event for you to enjoy the area
  • Sunday – Breakfast and Lunch, Tutorials (for paid attendees)

Registration is now open at http://www.iiug2016.org/register.php. Register for IIUG 2016 by February 4, 2016 to receive a $275 discount over the Regular conference price. Don’t forget that all IIUG members can save an additional $100 on registration through May 5. 2016. IIUG membership is free at Join IIUG, so become a member today. Being a member of the IIUG also provides access the monthly Insider newsletter, members only pages for free downloads and other benefits reserved for IIUG members only. We hope to see you all in May.

IIUG 2016 Planning Committee

Call for Speakers IIUG 2016 — Deadline for Submission Extended to December 10, 2015

PLEASE NOTE: we have many great topics to choose from for IIUG 2016, but we wanted to ensure everyone who wants to submit their topic has an opportunity to get it to us. We have extended the call for speakers through December 10, 2015 for those of you who have not yet had the opportunity to submit your proposal.

Speaker guidelines can be found at: /conf/call_for_presentations if you need additional information.

All selected speakers will receive a complimentary pass to IIUG 2016. This pass will include: the Wednesday night Welcome Reception, access to all sessions from Thursday through Saturday, the receptions on Thursday and Friday nights, and access to the Exhibit area. The pass does not include the Sunday tutorials, however, they can be purchased for a nominal fee. For your convenience speaker logins have been retained for those who submitted a presentation proposal for IIUG 2015. Please submit your presentation proposal and biography today for consideration for IIUG 2016. Submit your proposal using http://www.iiug2016.org/speakers.

If you are still unsure about speaking at IIUG 2016 or you don’t have a topic you want to present, submit your request for assistance at conference@iiug.org.

IIUG 2016 Planning Committee


Support corner Back to top

What’s new

Just a few days ago, IBM released a new version of Informix Dynamic Server. It has a lot of new features and improvements, and you can learn more details about what is available in this release here.

The one of interesting things that can help a lot of people relates to Auto Update Statistics. By default all databases have a medium priority. Now, you can assign specific databases a high or a low priority to ensure that statistics for your most important databases are updated first. Statistics for low priority databases are updated after high and medium priority databases, if time and resources permit. For example, if you have a system with a production and a test database, you can assign the production database a high priority and the test database a low priority. You can also disable AUS for a database. These AUS priorities can be set in the IBM OpenAdmin Tool (OAT) for Informix or by adding rows to the ph_threshold table in the sysadmin database.

If AUS is not of interest, check out the improvements in JSON compatibility, multi-tenancy, security, time series data, and more. Even the installation routines received a much needed overhaul to improve how things work.

– 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 November 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.

Headline Status Votes
oncheck should check the Timeseries data associated with a table Submitted 5
Top 15 RFEs (By number of votes)
Headline Status Votes
In-Place Alter for varchar, lvarchar and boolean Under Consideration 37
Backup from RSS or HDR Secondaries using ontape, onunload, onbar, dbexport Under Consideration 32
SQL interface to obtain the temporary space usage (tables, hash, sorts…) Submitted 24
Implementation of regular expressions (adding to LIKE/MATCHES functions) Under Consideration 20
Request to track and save a time stamp for last time an index was used. Nee… Submitted 18
Obtain the query plan of a running query Submitted 17
ALTER owner of database objects after creation Submitted 12
Backup Individual database, not entire instance Submitted 11
Include the regexp datablade into the Informix product Submitted 9
Enable defined limits on sqltrace Submitted 8
Enable HDR Secondary to perform archives Submitted 7
CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW Submitted 7
Clone a database Submitted 6
oncheck should check the Timeseries data associated with a table Submitted 5
Remove limitation on TEXT and CLOB datatype to have the same functionality … Submitted 3

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.

Gary Ben-Israel


Informix corner Back to top

Videos

Learn about Parallel Sharding on IBM Informix

Eurotech’s IoT gateway embeds Informix

Iot Informix Demo Series

Informix Storage and RAID5 – Doing Storage the Right Way!

Presentations

High availability best practices for IBM Informix

Developing hybrid applications using IBM Informix

Recipes

Raspberry Pi 2 + IoT Foundation + Bluemix + Informix

Informix IoT event at Seattle

Join IBM and its Key Partners for a special event at the IBM Briefing Center in Seattle on 13th December. This half-day event will feature real world solutions using the latest IoT, cloud and analytics technologies. Come and learn how leading edge solutions can be implemented now and take the opportunity to meet the IBM and Key Partner teams supporting IoT industry solutions. Register for the event here.


Informix News Back to top

Lifehacker: Three Things IT Pros Need To Know About The Internet Of Things

Talkin’Cloud: What IT Professionals Need to Know About the Internet of Things


Calendar of events Back to top

May – 2016
Date Event Location Contact
4-8 IIUG 2016 Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, at Ponte Vedra Beach. Florida conference@iiug.org

 


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

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 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

/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.
Editor: Gary Ben-Israel

For comments, please send an email to gary@iiug.org.

 

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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.