Washington Area IBM Database User Group - News and Information

Presentations from our meeting on June 18, 2009

• Informix Road Map - Fred Ho, Program Director, IBM - download presentation
• Business Intelligence with Informix Warehouse - Fred Ho, Program Director, IBM - download presentation
• Data Warehousing with Informix - Lester Knutsen - download presentation
• Data Fragmentation Strategies for Loading and Reporting Performance in your Data Warehouse - Warren Donovan - download presentation
• Graphing Informix Data using PHP - Tom Beebe - download presentation and download files
• Fastest Informix DBA Contest II - Lester Knutsen - link

Meeting - Wednesday January 28, 2009 - What's New in Informix

In spite of the ice and snow we had a great meeting, here are some of the presentations.

Agenda: What's New in Informix

• What's New in Informix - by Carlton Doe, IBM -  Come and see the latest trends and technology in IDS version 11. We're talking exciting new stuff that is less than 2 months old trends and technology. - download presentation
• Enterprise Replication trouble shooting and lessons learned by James Edmiston, Quest Information Systems - download presentation or download Quick Reference Guide
• Informix on the Mac - by Lester Knutsen - See a combination of the fastest and easiest to use OS and database in one bundle - click here for more info!
• Apple Trends and Directions - James L. McMahan Jr., Systems Engineer, Apple Government

Meeting, January 28 at IBM Tech Center, Washington, D.C. by by Nick Nobbe

It was an icy day in DC and our meeting started a bit late as members straggled in from the suburbs, but it soon turned into a lively, full morning.

Carlton Doe, well-known leading IBM author and Informix expert led off with an update on IDS and its future in the IBM firmament. In this time of a shrinking market, the good news is that Informix’s market share is expanding, with two digit growth, quarter to quarter continuing up through the end of 2008.

This latest version of “Cheetah” (IDS 11.5) packs enough features to be considered a new version. With the introduction of OAT, a truly cool web & PHP-backed admin and diagnostic tool allowing a high level of drill down, admins can do most of their management through the OAT. At the same time, SQL and the command-line utilities are keeping apace to support management and all enhancements to the database, including replication. Also featured in this release – huge improvements to high availability data replication in MACH 11 and the introduction of an automatic failover and load balancing feature through its new online connection manager (“oncsmsm”). And that’s not all; you can read Carlton’s full presentation on the WAIUG website, www.iiug.org/waiug , or learn more about “Cheetah” – IDS 11.5 – at www.ibm.com/informix.

Our next speaker, James McMahan, a systems engineer representing Apple Computers, Government, announced that his company and IBM have collaborated on the recent port of IDS 11.5 to Apple’s servers, as Apple grows its share in the 64-bit server market. With this, Apple is also opening up the desktop for a full-fledged, efficient database system, and Informix is the tool of choice. Lester Knutsen, WAIUG president, reported that he had demoed a beta “Cheetah” on “Leopard” at last summer’s Kansas IBM-IIUG conference and it ran with blazing speed.

James Edmiston, of Quest Information Systems, and long-time IIUG and WAIUG board member, closed the meeting with a complete fly-by of Enterprise Replication, which highlighted all the critical points. His latest experience with E.R. and debugging an E.R supported application, forced him to take a deep look under the hood and to determine the problems were caused by the application and that E.R. was rock solid.

Thanks to IBM and especially Warren Heising and Michael Moody for hosting a very enjoyable and profitable meeting.

Informix IDS 11 (Cheetah) Tech Day October 30, 2006 by Nick Nobbe

IBM hosted a well-attended, day-long get together of our local Washington Informix User Group at the IBM Bethesda, Maryland, site. The day was focussed on the latest and greatest release of IDS, 11.10, dubbed "Cheetah", the most feature-full release to date, and highlighted a few of the most salient features.

Gary Proctor, IBM Channel Marketing Manager from Lenexa, led off the meeting with an encouraging review and preview of the Cheetah/IDS marketing and development effort. Basically, thanks to the direction of Arvid Krishna, cross fertilization between the DB2 and IDS r&d arms, and a devoted user community,  IDS has  been experiencing double-digit percentage growth. Encouraged by the momentum, IBM is planning on a forthcoming "point" release with a slew of additional features and improvements. And the good news is that on the marketing front, IBM will be promoting placement of special IDS/Informix banner ads, coming soon to the web. Keep your eyes peeled.

Vijay Lolabattu from R&D, Menlo Park, and Dave Desautels, Lenexa, covered a few of the most radical improvements and extensions that should relieve the DBA of a lot of janitorial chores, and make daily life easier, safer, and more interesting. Vijay covered autonomic and manual tuning improvements (checkpoints, recovery time, LRUs, AIO-VPs, and direct IO with cooked dbspaces) and the new web administration control panel.  Dave covered enhancements in replication, always a solid part of IDS but now flourishing in a dazzling array of permutations (ER, HR, secondary servers, remote standby secondaries ...). He also gave a glimpse at workings of the newly added label-based access control security features, a huge improvement in security.

All in all, it was a very full day, with still enough time for meeting old friends, talking to the speakers, and even enough to eat and drink. Thanks to our local master of ceremonies Warren Heising, IBM, for hosting the meeting, and to Cindy Lichtenauer of the IIUG for her support scheduling the speakers and not least the free special developer edition of Cheetah (IDS 11.10) and other goodies.

Presentations

• Overview of IDS “Cheetah” - New features, results of the beta test run, and a roadmap of the future.
• AGILE – Performance enhancements in Cheetah, application development - Deliver peak performance to your applications.
• AGILE – IDS an Agile Choice for Application Development - Take advantage of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to deliver location based information to your applications.
• INVISIBLE – Enter the “Administration Free Zone” - IDS is well known for 'hands-free' reliability. The new OpenAdmin Tool provides a GUI based view of all of your data server activities - starting with a map of server locations that can drill down to the detail of an individual SQL statement. Other features allow automatic scheduling to keep your weekends free.
• RESILIENT – Availability Solutions in IDS “Cheetah” - Learn how customers achieve 99.999% availability (less than 5 minutes downtime/year), improved performance, and easy scalability.
• RESILIENT and SECURE – Protecting your Information Assets - New security features, including Label Based Access Control (LBAC) help protect information assets. New levels of control will make it easier to isolate protected information to meet regulatory compliance requirements and gain competitive advantage.

Forum 2006 - December 8-9, 2006

The Washington Area Informix User Group (WAIUG) based in Washington, DC, and the Southeast Informix Users Group (SEIUG), based in Atlanta, GA, have teamed up once again to present Informix User Forum 2006. This is the premiere Informix regional user group technical conference in the world. This is a user conference planned and run by Informix users for Informix users.

For more information, and a list of sessions, presentation downloads, pictures, and soponsors, visit the Forum 2006 Home Page .