Highlights: Introducing the New IBM Informix Support Offering
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
I can’t believe it is August already! This year is passing by so quickly.
This month, August 15th, we have Lester Knutsen presenting for our next Tech Talks. He will be sharing his insights on exploring the Informix Sysmaster database.
There have been 2 additional Informix sessions added to IBM TechXchange session catalogue, held October 21-24, 2024 in Las Vegas. These are now five Informix sessions. The added sessions are not dedicated Informix sessions, however, Informix will be discussed. See the Conference Corner Section for more information on how to register and view the Session Catalog.
We are still eagerly waiting for the release date of Informix 15.0. As soon as we know something we will share it with you. There is some good news, the RFE to allow partial indexes in all editions has been delivered in the recent Informix V14.10.FC11 drop.
Lastly, we are preparing for the IIUG Board of Directors elections. If you want to participate in the process, please take the time to ensure your IIUG Membership is up to date. The process will begin at the end of September, or early October 2024. This is a 2-year term. Nominees must be registered IIUG Members. Check your email and the IIUG website for the official announcement.
| Login | Join IIUG |
Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Insider Co-Editor
IIUG Board of Directors
rhonda@iiug.org
Highlights
Introducing the New IBM Informix Support Offering
This is intended to be a brief overview of the new product support plan being offered across IBM and to Informix products in specific. More details will be shared in the next IBM / Informix webcast in mid-September.
IBM is doing three things: discontinuing their Extended and Continuing Support option names, changing the amount of time each support option lasts and adding surcharges to support options. The intent, obviously, is to encourage customers to stay on current product versions rather than continue to use older products which are harder to maintain over time. In this way, IBM is no different than almost any other software vendor.
The legacy support pattern was a 5 + 3 + 1 year model. At least 5 years of full (aka base) support, 3 years of “extended” support (like base with surcharge), followed by 1 year of “continuing” support (known defect only / product upgrades with surcharge). Continuing support could be purchased as long as desired.
The new model is a 5 + 1 + 3 configuration with some pricing and availability changes. There is the 5-year minimum base support, but the 1 + 3 years are now called Extended support with two separate components, each with a required, aggregated surcharge to use. Component 1 (1 year) is like the legacy base-like extended support. At 1 year, this significantly reduces the amount of new “work” or bug fixes that goes into an end-of-support release. Component 2 is like the legacy continuing support. Each component has its own price tag/part number. To use component 2, for example, you must purchase base support, component 1 and component 2. Finally, there is a 3-year cap on component 2 after which it cannot be renewed. In theory. J Money always talks but don’t count on it.
For those who are on the modernization “upgrade”, your support options are limited to a 2 + 1 model with cumulative fixes replacing and outdating earlier releases requiring regular migrations to stay supported.
I hope this brief explanation helps. As I said, I’ll share more details, with pretty graphs, in the webcast next month.
Carlton Doe
IBM Informix Technical Product Manager
cdoe@us.ibm.com
Conference Corner
IBM TechXchange Conference Las Vegas, NV, USA
Title: IBM TechXchange Conference 2024
Date: October 21-24, 2024
Location: Mandalay Bay – Las Vegas, NV, USA
IMPORTANT: Two new sessions have been added. The new sessions are not strictly Informix, however, it will be discussed.
REMINDER: Due to a delay in the release of Informix V15. There will not be sufficient content to provide an Informix track. Therefore, the IIUG Board will not participate. We will continue to support this event and provide any Informix information regarding this event when it becomes available to us.
Be in the know about the latest tech, certifications, education & AI trends.
Join IBM to gain industry-leading skills, get a first look at the latest product roadmaps, engage in hands-on experiences, earn industry-leading credentials, network with thousands of peers, and hear from the best and brightest minds working in tech today. Discover what’s to come in your area of focus.
Informix Sessions:
|
Informix for watsonx – your way into AI – guide, examples and a fantastic success story Companies using IBM Informix can now unlock additional value from their Informix data through integration with watsonx. Watsonx facilitates rapid, governed access to data residing in IBM Informix, to enable the creation of real-time dashboards and insights reporting, as well as the processing of new analytics use cases and AI models. With watsonx.data’s new connector for IBM Informix, users can easily access and query multi-modal data types in IBM Informix as well as other data sources with zero-ETL, while delivering built-in governance, security, and automation. The watsonx.ai Informix connector makes it easy to build your AI use case. |
Henri Cujass, leole IT |
|
Informix, the database that does so much more! Informix has been part of IBM’s portfolio since 2001. A lot has happened to it since then to keep it a feature rich, cutting edge, fast database, with a huge range of applications. From its small footprint, autonomous features, MQTT and NoSQL support that makes it ideal as an embeddable database, to its speed, reliability and scalability as an Enterprise database, Informix is a great choice for so many applications. TimeSeries and Spatial support add capabilities to a relational database without the need to add to the software stack. Mike is an IBM Champion and has used Informix for over 25 years. This presentation will describe at a high level the many features of Informix that make it such a versatile product, and how it is so much more than just a standard relational database. |
Mike Walker, xDB Systems, Inc |
|
Securing Informix Connections with SSL Security has become more important than ever. Between compliance rules and best security practices there are many new rules and regulations that face a DBA these days. One of the most important, and often overlooked areas of security is the encryption of data-in-transit. Informix has a few different ways of establishing encryption. In this session we will cover how to configure SSL listeners in a variety of situations. This will help all types of Informix installs. From multiple edge IoT devices to huge data warehouses, this will be a valuable class for any administrator that needs to implement it. This is a technical talk focused as a how-to for getting SSL up and running in your Informix environment. |
Thomas Beebe, xDB Systems, Inc |
|
NEW: Using multiple data integration tools in a data architecture in the banking industry Architecture and projects associated with the integration (Datastage and Data Replication) of multiple data sources (informix and third party) to a data warehouse to define the consume of information of data analysts, BI developers and other business users. |
Carlos Hernandex, Gerente, Intercam |
|
NEW: The WWT Advanced Technology Center: IBM Products, Use Cases, Integration, and Lessons Learned The WWT Advanced Technology Center is a $850 million collaborative ecosystem to design, build, demonstrate, and deploy innovative technology products and integrated architectural solutions. We have built an environment with IBM Power Systems, IBM Storage, and Red Hat Openshift – integrated with each other and with other vendors – to demonstrate the strength of IBM solutions. The environment builds awareness and credibility within a new IBM business partner, support POCs and demos, educate, and highlight opportunities for integration and interoperability, with a special focus on AI use cases, AI infrastructure, and hybrid and private cloud. In this session, multiple IBM Champions will describe what we’ve built, the various integrations and POCs that have been explored, and lessons learned. |
Ryan Avery, Storage Solution Architect, World Wide Technology Kevin Gee, Global Technical Solutions Architect (Field CTO), World Wide Technology |
For our Informix Community members who use or are interested in Informix as well as other IBM products you can learn more here: IBM TechXchange Conference 2024.
Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Board
Informix Corner
Informix Tech Talks on YouTube
Upcoming Informix Tech Talks
Title: Exploring the Informix Sysmaster Database
Date: Thursday, August 15, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM EDT
Speaker: Lester Knutsen
Description: Lester Knutsen will present his Informix Sysmaster Scripts for monitoring and performance tuning an Informix Database Server from his Advanced Informix Performance Tuning Course. We will cover disk and chunk I/O, Log Turnover, Performance Ratios, Table and Index I/O, and identifying the slowest SQL statements.
Lester Knutsen is an IBM Informix Lifetime Champion with over 40 years of Informix experience.
Last Informix Tech Talks Replay
Replay of the Last Informix Tech Talks: Migrating Databases Under the Worst Conditions – with Fail-back! – Art Kagel – May 2024
Informix Tech Talks YouTube Channel
Our YouTube Channel now has:
-
505 subscribers (4 new subscribers)
-
106 videos (no new videos)
-
18,512 views (474 additional views)
Informix Tech Talks YouTube Channel Videos
Past Informix Tech Talks Replays
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 Art Kagel or Rhonda Hackenburg for additional information.
Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Board
Schedule Your Informix 14.10 Exam Today
The Informix 14.10 Badge exam is still available!
The exam will be administered online. You are required to complete the exam with a proctor from our approved list, or nominate one of your own, to be approved by IBM or the IIUG Board. You will be required to have a live webcam running as you complete the exam.
For those not familiar with the term Proctor: Proctor is frequently used to describe someone who oversees an exam. In today’s testing environment, a proctor will typically verify a student’s identity by checking a photo ID and ensure academic integrity guidelines are followed during the exam.
Click here to learn more or schedule your exam.
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/
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.
Delivered
Allow partial indexes in all editions
IDS 14.10 contains this important new feature:
“Partial indexes avoid indexing common values. As the query searching for a common value will not use the index, there is no point in keeping those rows in the index. This reduces the size of the index, which will speed up queries that do use the index. It will also speed up many table update operations because the index does not need to be updated in all cases.”
We understand that tables comprised of multiple fragments (partitions) is part of the parallelisation features reserved for Enterprise Edition. Unfortunately, partial indexes has been implemented using the FRAGMENT BY EXPRESSION (or PARTITION) syntax, and this is rejected on lower editions (except Developer). Using the example table from the above documentation page:
CREATE INDEX idx2 ON tab1 (n2)
FRAGMENT BY EXPRESSION
(n2 IS NULL) INDEX OFF,
REMAINDER IN datadbs;
26453: Fragmentation is not supported in this edition of IDS
Recent
There were no new RFEs in July.
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: 108 (+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: 105 (+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: 93 (+0)
Created: December 24, 2018
Status: Future consideration
Gary Ben-Israel
IUG Board
IBM Informix Forum Corner
Join and visit the IBM Informix community forum
Recent Posts
Informix TechTalk: Exploring the Informix Sysmaster Database
webcast of V15 presentation replay?
Update SMALLFLOAT Larger Than -1.175494351E-38 Works?
Informix install and configuration on Google – GCE
ALTER TABLE Error #106: non-exclusive access
How to set up DBSA role or equivalent
CSDK installation on Docker linux container (.NET 8)
Error -25546 in connection manager 4.50.FC10
Recommended options for setting up SDS in a Linux environment
Memory block header in pool ‘rsam’ corruption
My database is relational, but my developers want to use NoSQL! Webinar
Informix 12.10FC Migration to RedHat 8
Process ended with network broken errors
Créer une sauvegarde ontape en multifichiers
shared memory not initialized for INFORMIXSERVER but Server is online!!
Rhonda Hackenburg
IIUG Board
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.
Technical Articles
https://www.oninitgroup.com/technical-articles/
Over 10 Years of Informix Webcast Replays
Over 30 Years of Informix Blog Posts
Social Media
| YouTube | X (Twitter) |
Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines
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