Highlights: IIUG Will NOT Be at IBM TechXchange
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.
Table of Contents
Editorial
Talking to colleagues I often hear the statement “Informix is dead”. It is not. The question is for how long. IBM and HCL are not interested in developing, marketing or selling Informix. They are satisfied with the revenue from the customers who are still using the product.
The IIUG Board of Directors will continue to support our user community as we always did.
Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor
IIUG Board of Directors
gary@iiug.org
Highlights
IIUG Will NOT Be at IBM TechXchange
In last month’s Insider, we shared that we were working with the IBM TechXchange committee to support this new IBM event. It is comprised of two portions. Community Day on 9/11, a one-day pre-conference event for IBM User groups and the main event September 12-14. We offered to be part of the IIUG Community Day and provide Informix content in good faith that IBM would also support the Informix Community with Informix content during main event.
We promoted this event and asked our community to submit presentations for the main event. We would like to thank our community members and IBM employees who submitted sessions for TechXchange. Sadly, no Informix submissions were selected for the TechXchange main event; despite the fact there was someone from the Informix community on the selection committee.
IBM also wanted us to guarantee attendance at Community Day. Due to the lack of any Informix content during the main event, we didn’t see how we could. We have no idea how many in our community would pay for an entire event: registration, travel, lodging and meals, for only one day of Informix content.
For these reasons, we have decided to withdraw from the event and shift our focus. This was a very difficult decision for the Board to make.
We will continue to advertise IBM’s TechXchange. However, the IIUG Board will not participate or attend any part of IBM TechXchange.
We will continue to support our community in other ways.
Stay tuned.
Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Board of Directors
Informix Corner
Informix Tech Talks on YouTube
Upcoming Informix Tech Talks
We are sorry to report our July Tech Talks speaker had to cancel. We have not been able to find a replacement speaker. If you know someone who would be interested, they can contact either Bruce Simms or me, Rhonda Hackenburg. We are looking for something that is 30-60 minutes.
If we find someone to present, we will send a email to announce the event and a provide a registration link.
Thanks to all our past speakers.
Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Tech Talks Committee
Last Informix Tech Talks Replay
Replay of the Last Informix Tech Talks: June 1, 2023: Lycia Low Code Development Platform, Hubert Hölzl from Querix
Informix Tech Talks YouTube Channel
We now have 388 subscribers to our YouTube channel.
We have 99 videos on YouTube on our Channel.
Our Channel has received over 11,100 views!
Informix Tech Talks YouTube Channel Videos
Past Informix Tech Talks Replays
Rhonda Hackenburg
In Search of Tech Talks Speakers
We are looking for additional speakers and especially any new speakers to share your Informix knowledge with our user Community via the IIUG Tech Talks. We will assist you in preparing for your Tech Talks presentation by prerecording your session. This will allow you to be available to answer any questions that come up in the chat during you presentation.
If you are interested in producing a 15 – 45-minute presentation, please contact either Bruce Simms or Rhonda Hackenburg for additional information.
Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Board
IBM TechXchange Conference – September 11-14, 2023
Join IBM for their newest technical event, IBM TechXchange! Learn the latest IBM technologies, including hybrid cloud and AI, including product roadmaps.
The event will be held at the MGM Grand Conference Center in Las Vegas from September 11-14, 2023.
Start your event one day earlier with a pre-conference Community Day. Meet with other professionals to share your knowledge and other interests.
PLEASE NOTE: As mentioned above, and at the time of this publication, there are NO Informix sessions offered at this event.
Click here to register for the event or learn more about IBM’s TechXchange
The early bird price ends July 21st at 5:00 pm EDT
Rhonda Hackenburg
Informix Training
Free Informix Tutorials Videos – a step by step approach to using Informix Database Servers are available at https://advancedatatools.com/tech-info/informix-tutorials/
IIUG Board Member Profile
Here it is again — time for a new board and new profiles. Let’s discover together board member Henri Cujass.
Q: How do you use Informix in your “real” job (DBA, Consultant, Developer, etc.)?
A: I work for our clients as a Informix Senior Consultant. My specialties are benchmarking and sizing of new Informix systems, license optimization, SQL tuning and data design.
Q: How long have you been using Informix products?
A: Since 1992
Q: What is your role on the IIUG Board?
A: I would like to increase the visibility of Informix in the overall IT and for young IT talents. I support with the social media presence. Informix should be as well known as a database back-end system again as it was years ago. For me, this also includes anchoring it in the connection lists of all known development tools.
It can’t be that a developer can’t find Informix in vain among the list of supported databases, but DB2 is present there. This must change again.
Q: Why did you volunteer to be on the board?
A: I would like to use my experience and my network to strengthen my influence on the manufacturer in the interest of Informix customers. Informix has a large customer platform in Europe. The perception of “Old-Europe” often seems a bit neglected from a US perspective. So, a voice from the DACH region is certainly helpful.
Q: What do you want to accomplish this year on the Board?
A: Informix should become visible again as a product on the market.
Q: Where are you from?
A: Germany.
Q: Best Informix story?
A: At the beginning of the Pandemic, I demonstrated an Informix Timeseries Benchmark in 3 days, delivering near real-time data to a typical encounter app. The timeseries benchmark with 20 million simulated people and billions of simulated encounters on a 16 cores Intel machine wowed everyone. The API to query, for example: Who did I meet today and when? I implemented it completely in SPL. It was a fantastic example of the most efficient use of Informix timeseries.
Q: Worst Informix nightmare.
A: A backup that cannot be restored.
Q: Can you tell us about your family and hobbies outside of IIUG?
A: We live and work in the southeast of Munich near the Alps in a small town with two ski lifts, 2 gas stations, many cows and many mountain bikers. We are very involved in international show jumping. Maybe some of you have seen our advertisement “leolo IT – supported by IBM Analytics” on TV.
I myself grew up with swimming which keeps me fit until today.
RFE Corner
IBM has an RFE – Request For Enhancements website.
Please visit the RFE site to vote for your favorite enhancements and place new requests. It is friendly and has a nice look and feel.
Recent
JDBC suport of collection data types in scroll cursors
Add onconfig parameter to limit TLS ciphers used
Popular (Over 50 votes)
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: 105 (+0)
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: 100 (+0)
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: 91 (+0)
Created: December 24, 2018
Status: Future consideration
Gary Ben-Israel
IBM Informix Forum Corner
Join and visit the IBM Informix community forum
Recent Posts
Large Fetch Bufer causes 4gl program to hang on an insert into a REPORT temp table
1–
Greetings Art & Company.
There is a down side to actually having a job: I don’t have a lot of time to finish installing my Informix stuff. (I’d rather have the job, of course; not the starving artist type. <grin>)
Well, I have installed it and created a reasonable (IMHO) ONCONFIG and SQLHOSTS file, as well as appropriate entries in /etc/services. I don’t want to install the CSDK until I can at least run dbaccess and dbaccessdemo. I had downloaded release ids.14.10.FC10 on my Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu).
System info:
$ uname -a
Linux maxwell2l 5.15.0-75-generic #82-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 6 23:10:23 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
And the latest run of oninit -t gives one error message:
$ oninit -t
cannot access /ifmx/ids.14.10.FC10/lib/libisi.so.2
No such file or directory (errno 2)
Look familiar on this thread?
This is an extremely long thread, even for me, who kids about my inability to be concise. I need a bottom line solution, which I cannot dig out of this thread. Someone tell me: “Jake do this and this…”
I should be able to get back on this over the July 4 holiday. Once I have that squared away I can install the CSDK, followed by Jonathan Leffler’s DBD::Informix.
Thanks for comprehensible advice on this.
——————————
Jacob Salomon
—
Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. –Attr: Yogi Berra
2–
in the Informixdir lib, create it as a link to the opensssl or gskkit library
Paul Watson
3–
Jacob,
Here’s what my system shows:
$ cd /opt/ibm/informix/ids14.10.FC10DE/lib
$ ls -l libisi*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 informix informix 19 Mar 18 05:26 libisi.so.2 -> ./libisi_gsk.so.2.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root informix 142096 Mar 18 04:59 libisi_gsk.so.2.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 informix informix 214480 Mar 18 05:26 libisi_o10.so.2.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 informix informix 218152 Mar 18 05:26 libisi_o11.so.2.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 informix informix 218024 Mar 18 05:26 libisi_oos.so.2.2
As Paul said it should be a symlink to one of the gskit libraries,
libisi_gsk.so.2.2 in this case.
Since you are on a Ubuntu/Debian based system, see if the gskit
packages were installed:
$ dpkg -l | grep ‘gsk’
That’s a lowercase ‘L’ flag. It should return something like
gskcrypt64 and gskssl64 with some version info. These should have
been installed during the Informix installation.
I’m on 64-bit Slackware and although it doesn’t use RPM to manage
packages, since I had the rpm command installed, when I installed
Informix, it installed these two RPM packages automatically:
gskssl64-8.0-55.26.x86_64
gskcrypt64-8.0-55.26.x86_64
The files were installed under /usr/local/ibm/gsk8_64.
Check if you have that directory. If so, gskit should be installed.
If not, you should have a directory “gskit” under your Informix
install location, e.g. /ifmx/ids.14.10.FC10/gskit.
On my system here’s what it contains:
$ pwd
/opt/ibm/informix/ids14.10.FC10DE/gskit
$ ls -l
total 20316
-rw-r–r– 1 informix informix 2696 Mar 7 17:53 README
-rw-r–r– 1 informix informix 3921920 Mar 7 17:51 gskcrypt64-8.0.55.26a.linux.x86_64.tar
-rw-r–r– 1 informix informix 16865280 Mar 7 17:51 gskssl64-8.0.55.26a.linux.x86_64.tar
-rwxr–r– 1 root informix 6711 Mar 7 19:38 installgskit
You should be able to run the installgskit script as root.
If that does not work, you can extract .deb packages from each
of the tarballs and use “dpkg -i” to install them.
Scot Jenkins
4–
Jacob:
As Scott and Paul pointed out, you have to link libisi.so.2 to either the GSK library or the SSL library depending on what you chose to use during server installation. So that would be either:
libisi_gsk.so.2.2
-or-
libisi_o11.so.2.2
Art Kagel
Probably not the record but ….
kernel: INFO: task oninit:1720 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
Help Request: Unable to login InformixHQ
Migrate Data Continuously from IBM Informix Database to AWS S3
Gary Ben-Israel
Informix Resources
Not a member, become an IIUG member and keep updated on all things Informix. It’s free.
Not a member, join The IBM Informix community and connect with other Informix data experts.
Informix Requests for Enhancements.
Informix Blogs ans Wikis
Andrés Repossi https://andreserepossi.wixsite.com/hablemosinformix (In Spanish)
Technical Articles
https://www.oninitgroup.com/technical-articles/
https://www.oninitgroup.com/faq-items/cloud-backups-with-informix-14-10/
Over 10 Years of Informix Webcast Replays
Over 30 Years of Informix Blog Posts
Social Media
| YouTube |
Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines
The IIUG old forums at http://www.iiug.org/forums/technical.php *** NO LONGER ACTIVE ***
Informix Marketing channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/informixmarketing?feature=results_main
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 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.
Editors: Gary Ben-Israel, Rhonda Hackenburg
For comments, please send an email to gary@iiug.org or rhonda@iiug.org