Highlights: Coming in 2020 – Free Informix Tutorials Webcast Series
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:
2.1 Coming in 2020 – Free Informix Tutorials Webcast Series
4.1 IBM Community Informix Webcast
4.2 IBM Think 2020 – San Francisco
5.3 Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines
Table of Contents
Editorial
Happy 2020 to Informix, IBM, HCL and all IIUG members. We wish you all a wonderful year.
We would like to see more news about Informix. So take part share your success stories and help us get the message out there.
For those not participating in the Informix community /community and the Informix RFE (Request For Enhancements) https://ibm-data-and-ai.ideas.aha.io/?project=INFX
Both sites are active. Your participation is important and active so please participate.
Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor
IIUG Board of Directors
Highlights
Coming in 2020 – Free Informix Tutorials Webcast Series
We are pleased to announce our 2020 Webcast series for Informix DBAs: “Informix Tutorials”. We will discuss configuration, disk layout, backups, performance tuning, and high availability disaster recovery implementation. Our Informix Webcasts are based on over 30 years of experience managing and tuning database systems. The webcasts will be presented by Lester Knutsen, Art Kagel, Tom Beebe and Mike Walker. All IBM Informix Champions from Advanced DataTools.
- Getting Started with Informix by Lester Knutsen on Thursday, January 30th, 2020 at 2:00 pm EDT
- Configuring a New Informix Server by Lester Knutsen on Thursday, February 27th, 2020 at 2:00 pm EDT
- Managing Informix Disk Space – March 2020
- Managing Informix Logs – April 2020
- Informix Backup, Recovery and High Availability – May 2020
- Connecting Users to Informix Servers – June 2020
- Basic Informix Server Monitoring – August 2020
More info and registration at https://advancedatatools.com/tech-info/next-webcasts/
Lester Knutsen
RFE Corner
IBM has created a new RFE – Request For Enhancements website.
https://ibm-data-and-ai.ideas.aha.io/?project=INFX
Please visit this site to vote for your favorite enhancements and place new requests.
As you can see, it is a new RFE site. It is friendly and has a nice look and feel.
Recent
Full HDR switch between primary and secondary with a single command and without any downtime
- We have 2 servers with 2 HDR instances each.
- For each cluster we have also 2 connection manager each.
- On server one there is the primary of cluster 1 and the secondary of cluster 2
- On server two there is the primary of cluster 2 and the secondary of cluster 1
- For maintenance reasons it would be nice to have a single command to promote the an HDR secondary as primary and the former primary automatically as an HDR secondary.
- With onmode -d make primary on the secondary it takes quite a long time until the secondary will be promoted as primary. The reason is that the secondary could only be promoted as primary when all oninit processes of the former primary will be stopped.
- In our landscape, even with minimum time settings, it takes over 3 minutes plus the time to set up the former primary as secondary. Even this set (hdrmksec.sh) takes between 5-10 minutes because of the amount of shared memory we have on this instance.
- In a production environment with 24/7 requirements the needed time even 3++ minutes are not exceptional.
Votes: 4
Created January 2020
Status: Needs review
Allow Informix to kill sessions not only limited by session-id
Informix should be able to kill sessions not only limited by session-id:
For example:
If a admin should kill sessions from a specific user or host a script is needed.
So it would be helpfull if onmode -z would accept following syntax for example:
$ onmode -z user=SomeSessionsFromUser2Kill
or
$ onmode -z host=SomeSessionsFromHost2Kill
Votes: 3
Created December 19, 2019
Status: Needs review
Allow Informix to accept Non PAM aware clients to connect when using PAM PASSWORD mode
Enhance availability of readahead performance details
Allow Informix to accept Non PAM aware clients to connect when using PAM PASSWORD mode
Standard Informix Authentication on unix will perform a getpwnam() call to retrieve the encrypted shadow password from the OS, it will then compare an encrypted version of the password supplied by the client against this, and if they match, authentication would succeed.
Unfortunately, LDAP clients and servers are no longer sending the encrypted passwords across the wire due to Security issues, and some common implementations of authentication like SSSD specifically stop sending any encrypted password over the network.
We are therefore forced to use PAM to authenticate our several thousand user base.
However, a large portion of our estate use older clients such as OLEDB, or DataDirect ODBC drivers (Like IBM Information server).
These clients will not work when connecting to a PAM configured port, the Engine will only accept clients that have sent the CLNT_PAM_CAPABLE flag to the server.
Theoretically, this behavior is only required for connections where PAM is in CHALLENGE mode, as the client will need to be able to deal with PAM callbacks.
However, this is not required in PASSWORD mode, as the password is already sent in the request.
Several older Clients, as well as OLEDB clients will never send this flag, and as such cannot connect, even when using PASSWORD mode. This is an unnecessary restriction, and is causing significant problems to us and other customers.
Votes: 14
Created December 16, 2019
Status: Needs review
Provide a Prometheus exporter for Informix
Many organizations use unified approach to collecting, storing and visualizing metrics from various sources using at least one of the few established platforms of which Prometheus+Grafana are probably the most prominent. It would be very beneficial if Informix Dynamic Server metrics would be exposed via the Prometheus exporter to support such integration.
Votes: 2
Created December 12, 2019
Status: Needs review
Popular
Backup from RSS or HDR Secondaries using ontape, onunload, onbar, dbexport
In HDR environments, being able to backup or export databases from and HDR, HDR read-only, or an RSS secondary server is critical. Programs like ontape, onunload, dbexport, and onbar generate locks on tables during backups and data-exports. This creates problems while applications and users using Informix try to use the system during backups in 24 x 7 x 365 production environments. Being able to backup or export data on secondary systems is critical for compliance and backup integrity.
Votes: 93
Created: December 24, 2018
Status: Future consideration
Obtain the query plan of a running query
Many times a DBA is called to check upon a slow process. Most of the times those processes are running a slow query.
Sometimes it’s hard to know if the query is using the best query plan or not. A DBA can reproduce the query, but it it was prepared without values or if the statistics were changed after it started there is no guarantee that the query plan seen by the DBA is the same as the running query.
We have “onstat -g pqs” which sometimes can give us a clue, but it’s mostly cryptic and undocumented. If a user has X-Windows he can try xtree, but it’s a bit strange for todays standards.
We also have SQLTRACE, but if it was not set when the query was launched it will not capture the info (and besides, due to the circular nature of the buffer it may not be there at the time we need it).
A simple pseudo-table in sysmaster could probably implement this with ease.
It could also be extended to support the “last” query plan making it easy to get the query plan in any tool
Votes: 78
Created: December 24, 2018
Status: Future consideration
Backup Individual database, not entire instance
Need a mechanism, similar to ontape, to backup a live database (as opposed to entire instance), without locking it.
Votes: 65
Created: December 24, 2018
Status: Future consideration
Informix should be able to change owner on tables and any other objects
If user=informix creates all database and all tables, then programmer creates table but user=informix cannot change it. Only drop it.
Votes: 60
Created: December 24, 2018
Status: Future consideration
Gary Ben-Israel
Events
IBM Community Informix Webcast
January 21, 2020 10:00 AM EST
New Remote Encryption Key Storage in Informix Database Server 14.10
Join John Lengyel to kick-off the 2020 Informix webcast series. Learn more about the latest options for Remote Encryption Key Storage available in Informix 14.10.
IBM Think 2020 – San Francisco
May 4, 2020 – May 7, 2020
Moscone Center – SF, 747 Howard St
San Francisco, CA 94103 United States + Google Map
Informix Resources
IIUG website
www.iiug.org
IBM Informix home page
www.informix.com or directly at: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/
IBM Informix community
/community
Informix Blogs and Wikis
Blogs and Wikis
- Art Kagel http://informix-myview.blogspot.co.il/
- Andrés Repossi https://andreserepossi.wixsite.com/hablemosinformix (In Spanish)
- IBM Blogs https://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/tag/550
Social Media
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/25049
Twitter : https://twitter.com/iiug
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/IIUG.Informix
Informix IoT Channel : https://ibm.biz/BdH2nm
Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines
- The IIUG forums at /forums/technical.php
- Informix Marketing channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/informixmarketing?feature=results_main
- IBM DATABASE MAGAZINE at http://www.ibmdatabasemag.com
- Credentials, the IBM Certification Newsletter at http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/email/201307credentials.shtml
- 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. To join, simply go to: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/25049/5E4B2048E558
Closing and Credits
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 Information 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
