IIUG Insider (Issue #182) August 2015 Other Issues

Highlights: Start planning for the greatest Informix event of 2016

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
• Highlights
• Conference corner
  • IBM Insight Session Preview Tool
• Support corner
  • Fun with Setnet32 on Windows
• RFE corner
• Informix corner
  • Intel-IBM Informix Building Automation Demo
  • Looking for Informix videos?
• Calendar of events
• Informix resources
  • Informix Blogs and Wikis
  • Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines
• Useful links
• Closing and credits

Here in Israel the summer vacation is over and New Year holidays are about to start. So things are very slow. But Informix is going on as usual and so is the IIUG Insider.

IBM Insight 2015 is around the corner and the IIUG Board of Directors will have a board meeting at the conference. We hope to meet many of you as well. In any case, make sure you do not miss the greatest Informix event of 2016. Curious? Read all about it in the Highlights.

Gary Ben-Israel

Start planning for the greatest Informix event of 2016

The IIUG board has (finally, whew) completed their search for the location for IIUG 2016, and are very pleased to announce that the next edition of our very fine event will take place at the Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, from May 4 - May 8, 2016.

For those of you not familiar with the area, the resort is also the home of the "TPC at Sawgrass Stadium Course," at which the PGA event, "THE PLAYERS Championship", is contested each year. Also commonly known in golf circles as "The Fifth Major," the tournament will be held the week after we "warm up the place" with IIUG 2016. For the golfers in the group, this course features the notorious 17th hole with the "Island Green."

Of course none of this says anything about the Sawgrass Marriott itself, which is an outstanding property offering luxury service at typically low IIUG prices. Sawgrass Marriott was named World's Best Golf Hotel by the World Golf Awards for 2014 and was among the Gold Award Winners for Premier Resorts by Golf Magazine for 2014 and 2015.

It is a 40 minute drive from the Jacksonville Florida (JAX) airport, and a slightly longer (2 hour) drive from the Orlando Florida (MCO) airport, where Mickey and his Disney friends live, in case you want to do some "Mousing" along with your Informix. Find out more about Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa.

Of course IIUG 2016 will feature the best speakers from the Informix world, including users and more than the usual cast of IBMers, and the grand return of Jonathan Leffler to the Informix fold.

Call for Speakers will start around October 15, 2015, so stay tuned, and get excited!

Stay up to date on all the conference news here in The Insider and at www.iiug2016.org.

We look forward to see you there.

The CPC Team

Attending the IBM Insight 2015 conference? Get a sneak peek of Insight. Start planning your conference now with the Session Preview Tool. Explore, find your favorites, and save a sample agenda. You can start planning your schedule right away!

You can install both 32-bit and 64-bit Informix clients on a 64-bit Windows machine. Each client has its own setnet32.exe command for managing the connection information with the SQLHOSTS registry key. You should use the setnet32.exe installed with the client since different modes of setnet32.exe access different registry views on 64-bit Windows systems.

The 64-bit setnet32.exe only manages the connection information for a 64-bit client with the SQLHOSTS registry key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Informix\SQLHOSTS whereas the 32-bit setnet32.exe manages the connection information for 32-bit clients with the SQLHOSTS registry key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Informix\SqlHosts . If you have more than one version of 32-bit or 64-bit client installed, all the versions share the same SQLHOSTS key.

- David Jay

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 August 2015

Despite the vacation period, we can notice an intense activity this month.

Only update rows in referenced tables only once per template repair (with p > 0), thus avoid deadlock & LongTX
Votes: 1
This is about Enterprise Replication. As part of customer's migration strategy, they take a backup of a node and restore it on a new node. During this time updates can occur, so this new node needs to be checked (w/ cdr check -repair) to see if it's in sync with the rest of the cluster when brought online. Request to only update rows in referenced tables only once per template repair.

Backup Individual database, not entire instance
Votes: 1
The customer wants to backup only one database from the production instance. Ontape/onbar do not allow this, and dbexport locks the database in exclusive mode, making it impossible. Request a mechanism, similar to ontape, to backup a live database (as opposed to entire instance), without locking it. My additional comment: this is the best opportunity to use John Miller's stored procedure "How to create a stored procedure which emulates a very fast dbexport in dirty read mode". Applicable from 11.50 xc4 and above.

No more slots
Votes: 1
Unable to connect database after reaching connection limits. And we observe very generic error as "No more slots". This looks like the customer has to log a PMR.

Max connection reached- Notification
Votes: 1
Request for the engine to send Send a message back to the remote client informing the client that max servers has been reached to client when Max connections # is reached.

Add constant to centralized Key of ER Consolidation Model
Votes: 11
Enterprise Replication: request for a feature that allows one server to create and manage a centralized unique key for a given table, when identical tables are replicated from many similar servers, with different contents (different stores).

Enable defined limits on sqltrace
Votes: 5
Request for a feature that gives ability to add limits when enabling sqltrace to limit it to only trace by specific requirements. The basic one, which this alone would make a huge difference would be the ability to list one or more tables and only have it trace queries that referenced those tables. Another would be adding a limitation so it would only trace if it ran for x amount of seconds (long running queries).

Dropping Primary Keys
Votes: 1
Request to Aalow the following syntax for dropping a primary key: alter table table-name drop primary key. Can be handy when the constraint has not been named at creation time.

Suppress fast repeating event from running alarmprogram for each event
Votes: 4
Request to suppress (fast) re-occurring messages from executing the external alarmprogram script. In this customer's case, alarmprogram was executed 97000 in few minutes, overloading file system. One alarm, or even 10, could be enough, but not 10000 alarms.

Add update_ipa task to future Informix 11.70 release
Votes: 3
Request to retro-implement the sysadmin task update_ipa. This task provides a solution for tables that are impacted by numerous alter table statements, exceeding Informix limit of 255 versions. The application provider REFUSES to support V12.10, allegating this will cost huge amount of money(and why not rewrite all their application???) . Once again an application provider playing against Informix, thinking that migrating to a newer version of Informix is a nightmare just like ‘some' other famous DBMS.

odbc support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1
Votes: 1
Request to issue an Red ODBC driver for Red Hat linux 7.1 Enterprise. Former Driver returns errors. Red Brick on Red Hat makes a red case...

Uppercase tablenames support by CDC API
Votes: 1
Informix Change Data Capture currently do not support upper-case table names. Workaround used is to create synonyms, but this solution is performance costly. Request for CDC to support uppercase table names.

Top 13 RFEs (by votes)

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.

Eric Vercelletto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5_GZJsw1Lo&feature=youtu.be.

Search YouTube for: IBM Informix Channel

http://www.informix.com or directly at: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/

Blogs and Wikis that have been updated during the last month

• Informix documentation team
• PlanetIDS: Blogs, Videos, News and more *** Up to date feeds from many blogs ***
• Eric Vercelletto (In French)

More Blogs and Wikis

• Eric Vercelletto (In English)
• Ben Thompson's blog ****New****
• Art Kagel
• Fernando Nunes
• ognjen.orel
• Martin Fuerderer
• Just Dave Info *** Informix and other products ***

• 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.

http://www.iiug.org/quicklinks.html

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.

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

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