IIUG Insider (Issue #164) February 2014 Other Issues

Highlights: Elections for IIUG board of directors

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
  • Elections for IIUG Board of Directors
• Conference corner
  • IIUG2014 Confirmed Sessions Posted!
• Developer corner
  • Informix Chat with the Lab
  • Webcast: How to Bridge New Computing Technologies By Combining SQL and NoSQL data for Powerful BigData, Cloud, and Mobile Enterprise Applications
• Informix news
  • SOAPBox Release 1.5 Now Supports IBM Informix
  • The Bus Anomaly in Test Data Management
  • Case Studies
  • Recap of Informix Chat with the Lab
  • Recap of NoSQL TweetChat
• Support Corner
• Informix corner
  • IBM Technical Content
  • Informix 12.1 Bootcamp
• Calendar of events
• Informix resources
  • Informix blogs and wikis
  • Forums, groups, videos, and magazines
• Useful links
• Closing and credits

We had a very good board meeting this February. Many new ideas. We are working on new ways of communication with our membership , especially the IIUG website and the IIUG Insider, so stay tuned.

Our conference is less the two months away. If you haven't registered yet hurry up.

Looking forward to meeting you in Miami.

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor

Nominations closed on February 24, and the IIUG board is reviewing the candidates. The membership will be informed soon about the candidates and the election time table.

Stay tuned.

Late Registration has begun, but you can still save on your registration by applying your $100 IIUG Membership Discount for a total cost of $1075 USD. Register today and join us for the Sixth Annual IIUG Conference at our new location in Miami.

Not an IIUG member? It’s fast! It’s easy! It’s free! Become a member to save on your conference registration and gain access to downloads of the latest IBM Informix products, Informix DBA Utilities and Online Forums.

Please remember, this hotel is smaller than we are used to and rooms are booking quickly. It’s very possible we will have more conference attendees than we have rooms. If you know you will be attending IIUG2014 you should register ASAP to guarantee a room. We do NOT have an overflow hotel and other hotels in the area are at least $50 more per night.

This year’s conference follows the same format as last year. IIUG2014 opens Sunday evening with a Welcome reception where you can catchup with old friends and make new contacts. Three full-days of technical sessions, hands-on labs and keynotes fill the agenda Monday thru Wednesday. A multitude of invaluable topics for Informix users and administrators will cover popular Informix features, engine and application performance tuning, troubleshooting and much more. We will also have receptions on Monday and Tuesday evenings. The conference will conclude on Thursday with a full day of tutorials. We will also have several sponsors who are waiting to talk with you.

Remember, your IIUG2014 conference registration guarantees you entrance to the May 1st tutorials at NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE for all paid attendees. This is a great opportunity to extend your training budget.

Speakers are starting to submit their presentations for IIUG2014. As these sessions are submitted we will continue to add them to the conference website. The speakers at IIUG2014 are the best the Informix community has to offer. New speakers and familiar faces are eager to share their knowledge and expertise while presenting interesting and relevant topics that can be used to reinforce your professional skills.

Here's a partial list of this year's sessions:

• Running NoSQL Cloud Applications in Informix
• Informix Replication Technologies
• Deploy IBM Cognos with IBM Informix and IWA Acceleration
• Getting Performance Out of Your Application in a Secured Environment
• Globalization and Your Database
• TimeSeries Performance Tuning
• Informix Benchmarks
• Monitoring the Health of Your Database
• Business Analyticsv
• NoSQL/JSON
• Genero
• And much, much more

The list of sessions will be updated weekly as sessions are submitted, so visit the IIUG2014 website regularly to see the full list of submitted sessions.

Use our Justification Document if you are still having problems convincing your boss this is a valuable way to spend your training dollars.

See you at the Conference!
Apr 27 - May 1, 2014
J.W. Marriott Brickell Ave. Miami, Florida

Contact us if you have any questions concerning this year’s conference.

Presented by: Jerry Keesee - Director, IBM Informix Database Development (IBM), Darin Tracy - Sr. Software Engineer - CTE Informix Competitive Technical Enablement (IBM)

Hosted by: Anita McKeithen (IBM)

Why IBM Informix is best suited for the Internet-of-Things. From its embed capabilities with its small footprint and ease of use and administration, to its use in the cloud as a fully operational database with warehouse and analytic capabilities. IBM Informix is a single database that provides solutions from end to end in the Internet-of-Things.

Registration

For technical questions, contact support at support@collabserv.com

For questions about this event, contact the host at: mckeithe@us.ibm.com

Date: March 5th, 2014

Time: 12:00PM ET, 9:00AM PT

Attend this webcast to hear how enterprises, large and small, can develop applications that bridge the gap between new computing technologies designed for big data, cloud, and mobile computing, with their enterprise world of relational data.

Registration

Feeling Your Informix OAT's - Part 2: Apply the Open Admin Tool (OAT) environment to advanced Informix database administration.

Article: The first two databases to be supported are SQL Server and Informix.

Kaifa captures new markets with innovative smart metering solutions — Kaifa entered into a three-way partnership with #IBM and AMT-SYBEX, building an innovative and efficient smart metering solution based on Affinity Meterflow and #IBM #Informix software.

New video case study — Advanced Data Tools, IBM Informix, and IBM BladeCenter.

Recap: Speed-of-thought query response with Informix Warehouse Accelerator and new SQL enhancements in Informix 12.1

Thanks to all who participated in the February 20th TweetChat Why NoSQL and Why Informix NoSQL. It was well attended discussion answering several questions on factors driving NoSQL.

How to change multiple configuration parameters at once?

At present most of the Informix configuration parameters can be modified dynamically. Typically, users run 'onmode -wf' or 'onmode -wm' command to dynamically change a specific configuration parameter. But there may be a situation when you need to modify multiple parameters at once. For example, you have ten Informix instance and want to tune some of SQL statement cache configuration parameters on all the Informix instances.

Now, you can import a configuration file using onmode command to change multiple configuration parameter at once. Importing a configuration file is often faster and more convenient than changing one configuration parameter at a time. You can use the 'onmode -wi' command to import a file that contains new values for multiple configuration parameters. If the parameters are dynamically tunable, the database server applies the new values. The import operation ignores the configuration parameters in the file that are not dynamically tunable and if the new parameter values same as the existing value.

However, you need to keep a note hare that an import operation changes the values of configuration parameters only in the memory. It does not modify the values in the ONCONFIG file on disk.

Let's take the same example as before, modify some of SQL statement cache configuration parameters using import operation. Currently, you have following settings:

STMT_CACHE         0
STMT_CACHE_HITS    0
STMT_CACHE_SIZE    512
STMT_CACHE_NOLIMIT 0
STMT_CACHE_NUMPOOL 1

You create a 'onconfig.new' file under '/tmp' directory with following values to modify the configuration parameters:

STMT_CACHE         1
STMT_CACHE_HITS    1
STMT_CACHE_SIZE    512
STMT_CACHE_NOLIMIT 1
STMT_CACHE_NUMPOOL 2

Next, you run the following command to import configuration values from file named 'onconfig.new' in the the /tmp directory:

$ onmode -wi /tmp/onconfig.new

   3 parameters successfully modified. See online log for more info.

The above command generates appropriate messages on screen and the message log. Following is an excerpt of the message log:

14:50:42  Importing configuration from '/tmp/onconfig.new':
14:50:42  Value of STMT_CACHE has been changed to 1.
14:50:42  Value of STMT_CACHE_NOLIMIT has been changed to 1.
14:50:42  Value of STMT_CACHE_HITS has been changed to 1.
14:50:42  Config Import Complete. 3 tunable parameters processed.
          3 modified, 0 unchanged, 0 could not be tuned.

You can notice only three out of the five parameters has been changed because either those are not dynamically tunable or using same existing value.

As the 'onmode -wi' command import a configuration file, you can also export configuration parameters from memory to a file using 'onmode -we' command.

- Sanjit Chakraborty

The IBM Knowledge Center Open Beta is available!

We're happy to announce the availability of our open IBM Knowledge Center Beta, live on ibm.com! The Beta ended February 28, 2014.

IBM Knowledge Center is our new framework for bringing together millions of pages of IBM product publications in a single location. In IBM Knowledge Center, you can search, filter, and even customize your content experience.

You can try out IBM Knowledge Center for yourself here::

http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/

Improving your technical content experience

IBM Knowledge Center brings IBM's technical publications together in a single location, and will replace over 800 individual IBM Information Centers.

For this release, we simplified the user experience, improved search, and refined the overall experience with many other enhancements. As always, you can get help on IBM Knowledge Center from the information icon in the upper right corner of the pane (also linked here):

http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/doc/kc_help.html

Send us your feedback!

After you've worked with IBM Knowledge Center, sign in with your IBM ID and take a few moments to complete the survey on IBM Knowledge Center.

Known Beta limitations

We are still:

• Fine tuning IBM Knowledge Center, so you might experience some minor functional issues
• Configuring and adding content to IBM Knowledge Center, so the content you see might not be exactly what you expect
• Configuring and indexing content for search, so search results might not be exactly what you expect, or might not be in all the languages you expect

On behalf of the entire IBM Knowledge Center team and all our content providers, we want to thank you very much in advance for your time and for helping us make IBM Knowledge Center a better information experience!

This bootcamp is for IBM Business Partners. IBM Informix is the database software which has been voted twice as number #1 in customer satisfaction. Clients love Informix because it is reliable, low cost, and administration free. Solution providers choose Informix for its best-of-breed embeddability. Available on Windows, Linux, Unix, and MAC, this technical workshop provides training on IBM Informix 12 in a classroom setting.

Registration

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

• PlanetIDS: Blogs, Videos, News and more *** Up to date feeds from many blogs ***
• Fernando Nunes
• Informix documentation team
• IDS Experts blog
• Louis T. Cherian
• Eric Vercelletto (In French)

More Blogs and Wikis

• Art Kagel
• John Miller
• Keshava Murthy
• Andrew Ford
• ognjen.orel
• Ajay-Gupte
• Fred Ho
• Martin Fuerderer

• The IIUG forums
• Informix Marketing channel on YouTube
• IBM data magazine
• Credentials, the IBM Certification Newsletter
• The Informix Zone

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.

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.