IIUG Insider (Issue #139) January 2012 Other Issues

Highlights: - Election time IIUG Board of Directors 2012

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
  • IIUG - Election time IIUG Board of Directors 2012
• Conference corner
  • 2012 IIUG Informix Conference Update
• Informix corner
  • Informix TimeSeries Hands on Lab
  • Advanced DataTools Informix Remote DBA/Support Offering
  • Informix India Annual User Group Meet
• Developer corner
  • Informix Chat with the lab
  • New in DeveloperWorks
• Informix news
• Support corner
  • PDQ warning
• Informix resources
  • Informix blogs and things
• Calendar of events
• Useful links
• Closing and credits

We are beginning a new year. In February we are starting the IIUG board election process. Please participate. If you don't wish to join the board, at least vote for those who do.

At the end of February the board will meet in Orlando FL. We are excited about 2012. The IIUG Informix conference will take place in San Diego, California. For the first time we are leaving Kansas and going west.

In 2012, Informix 12.10 will be launched. The EVP program is starting soon. Join it if you haven't already.

I am starting another year as the IIUG Insider editor. I will do my best to keep you up to date with the Informix news, events and technical content. If there is anything you would like to share, any ideas or suggestions, please send them to me. The Insider is not just a source of information. It is your voice.

Enjoy 2012.

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor

The 2011 IIUG Board of Directors is a diverse group of users, partners and IBM employees from all over the world. The current IIUG Board will complete its term soon. In preparation for the upcoming election of the 2012 IIUG Board, a Nominating Committee has been established chaired by former Board Member James Edmiston.

The committee is currently seeking candidates to run for the 2012 IIUG Board of Directors. If you have a passionate interest in Informix products, and the drive, vision, and commitment to lead and represent the world's most influential community of Informix users, please give your potential nomination serious thought.

Nominations will be accepted Feb 6, 2012 through Feb 20, 2012 and the election will take place shortly thereafter.

For additional info, visit: http://www.iiug.org/about/election.php.

If you would like to nominate yourself or a colleague, please contact the IIUG Nominating Committee by writing to board-election@iiug.org.

James Edmiston
Former IIUG Board Member
IIUG Elections Commissioner 2012
board-election@iiug.org

First, let me just say that we are in for an amazing conference this year. The IIUG Conference Committee has worked diligently through the submissions for technical sessions, hands-on labs, and tutorials and we have already received confirmation from a majority of our presenters that they will be attending.

Here is just a sampling of some of the topics that will be presented at the conference:

A Guide to Securing the Database
The enterprise database infrastructure houses a gold mine of information highly coveted by malicious hackers and spiteful insiders. As database threats escalate and the government tightens compliance regulations, the need for database security is imperative.

What a DBA Needs To Know About Assert Failures
Assert Failures can be extremely confusing to the newer/intermediate DBA. This session to go into as much detail as necessary to understand what the problem is, what caused it, and what you can look for to determine whether or not you have an actual data problem or are facing a product defect of some type. The session will explore the af.file and any possible workarounds for the case studies presented.

What's new in IDS Indexing?
Learn about the new index types in IDS, including Forest of Trees and partial column index. The session also explores some of the new index controls including extent size manipulation and create if not exists.

Do--Stats Better - AUS pre-11.xx and doing AUS better than AUS
The Informix Version 11.10 Auto Update Statistics feature is a good idea, but it is not available if your organization is still on an Informix version earlier than 11.10 or if you are using ANSI mode or non-logged databases. Learn how you can implement Auto Update Statistics in these environments. Even if you are using version 11.10 or later, AUS may be taking excessive resources to run and if you have large numbers of tables, the AUS Evaluator may never complete and your AUS runs may not be processing all tables. Learn how you can do AUS the "right" way.

Mobilize your data with Informix & Android
What are the new challenges for mobile applications? This session addresses the issues regarding security, offline operation, and business intelligence features, etc.

Eat OATs? Keeping Healthy with Informix’s Graphical OpenAdmin Tool
Understand the capabilities and architecture of OAT, OpenAdmin Tool for Informix. This will be an overview of the capabilities of OAT, highlighting such things as Replication, Query Tracing, Storage Optimization, Performance History Graphs, Auto Update Statistics, Space Management, along with its many other capabilities.

Index Design: Myths, Realities, and Magic
This presentation will review index structure, and discuss a number of ways to use and redesign indexes without affecting application integrity.

Automatic database tuning and monitoring with Informix
This session will explain how Informix can help enterprises better manage their database administration operations, reducing down-times as well as the overall time taken in database management. We will discuss different automatic tuning features available with Informix, as well as different database administration activities that can managed dynamically.

Open Source tools and Informix Warehousing
This presentation will give an overview of using Open Source tools with Informix in the Warehousing arena.

We also have confirmed the following tutorials for Sunday April 22nd:

Discovering and using Informix TimeSeries (Half-day) by Carlton Doe (IBM)
You've been hearing about TimeSeries for a while. It’s part of the IBM Smarter Planet but what is it and what does it take to use it? This tutorial will give you hands-on experience with this exciting technology.

Hands-on with Informix Warehouse Accelerator (Half-day) by Carlton Doe (IBM)
Informix Warehouse Accelerator enables customers to get results to analytical queries hundreds to thousands of times faster. This tutorial will give you an introduction to, and some hands-on experience with this new and exciting technology.

HELP!!! I need an Informix Disaster Recovery plan! (Half-day) by Rakesh Naik (IBM)
Don't have an Informix Disaster Recovery (DR) plan or not sure if your DR plan is adequate? Want to experiment with Informix DR strategies? This tutorial will first walk you through the different tools, utilities, and features you can use to develop a DR strategy within Informix, including ontape, onbar, archecker, external, load/unload, mirroring, and HDR. You will then understand the pros and cons of various DR strategies. It will then be time for you to exercise Informix DR operations as a result of various failure situations - including performing DR due to instance, dbspace, and Primary server failures, recovering dropped tables, using mirrored disks to restore down dbspaces, and recovering using external backups. While conducting these experiments, you will also learn how to monitor the DR operations (data transfers, threads, servers, etc) for troubleshooting and tuning purposes. During this session discussions and critiques of your particular DR strategies will be welcome.

Don't forget to keep checking the website, www.iiug.org/conf. The site will provide additional information on conference sessions and tutorials as it becomes available. Register for the conference today:

https://www.iiug.org/conf/2012/iiug/register.php

See you April 22nd -25th in San Diego, California

Matthew Elders
IIUG Conference Planning Committee

Folks,

Save the date, we are excited to announce that the next Washington Area Informix User Group event will be a one-day Hands on Lab on the Informix TimeSeries technology that is being used in the IBM Smarter Planet initiative with Metering Data and Smart Grid.

Informix is a market leader in the integration of what are called "extensibility" features that enable the database architect to natively create, store, and manipulate complex User-Defined Data Types (UDTs) with User-Defined Routines (UDRs) as though they were built-in data types in the database engine. With this capability, Informix can solve very complex problems with simple SQL statements. As a result, Informix is the perfect database engine to help create a Smarter Planet.

This lab will expose participants to one of these extensibility features — the Informix TimeSeries technology. A "time series" is any set of data that is accessed in sequence by time and can be processed and analyzed in a chronological order. Informix TimeSeries can be used in financial, scientific, utility, manufacturing, and other industries where data is captured over time and needs to be analyzed quickly and easily. Informix introduced some enhancements in the Informix 11.70.xC3 release and this lab will be based on that release.

In this Proof of Technology, participants will get hands-on with Informix TimeSeries technology to create and use regular and irregular times series, containers, calendars and more. Data will be loaded using Informix TimeSeries Virtual Tables and a bulk load routine. The student will use several Informix TimeSeries functions to hide/reveal data, perform complex calculations and more. Finally, participants will use an application that combines Informix TimeSeries and Informix Spatial technology to track vehicle movement as well as location and condition exceptions within a vehicle fleet.

We have limited space so register is required. Watch our user group web site at http://www.waiug.org/ for registration in a few days.

Regards - Lester

Remote Technical and DBA support from Advanced DataTools helps small, medium and enterprise installations maximize their IBM Informix database performance and uptime while minimizing costs and overhead. We can help resolve and/or prevent the worst technical problems you could imagine!

Advanced DataTools' staff of highly experienced, certified IBM Informix consultants are well trained in all levels of database performance and optimization. This allows us to offer our customers IBM maintenance and support contracts on most versions of Informix Dynamic Server, on any platform/operating system.

Top experts in the field, Art Kagel and Lester Knutsen, manage and support our team of certified IBM Informix consultants. Art and Lester each have over 28 years of Informix DBA experience and both have received the IIUG Directors Award, and the Inaugural Data Champion award by IBM.

For more information: http://www.advancedatatools.com/Solutions/Support.html

Learn + Collaborate + Share the experience at the Informix India Annual User Group Meet 2012.

Why attend:

Take advantage of the largest gathering of Informix Users in India and the networking opportunity.

• Presentations by IBM Thought Leaders and IBM Support.
• New content and more depth on the exclusive value propositions of Informix
• Exclusive session by Mr. Stuart Litel - President of International Informix Users Group (IIUG)
• Sessions by Informix Business Partners around the latest Informix solutions
• Opportunity to meet with IBM Informix Leadership team

RSVP:

Web: http://bit.ly/IIUGIndia2012
Phone: +91-9582607976
SMS: INFUG to +91-9582607976
Email: communities@bitflipping.com

Informix Dynamic Server(IDS) is well known for its fastest performance and most reliability, but accessing the data stored on IDS from clients also relies on the performance of hardware and operating system. This presentation will focus on how Informix takes care of some abnormal scenarios due to unpredictable random system events that can cause a database connection request or SQL request to take longer than expected, including slow networking speed and heavy system load. Through this presentation, the audience will learn how Informix handles the slow performance caused by something outside of Informix by taking advantage of the following features in different scenarios:

• INFORMIXCONTIME, LOGINTIMEOUT(JDBC), and INFORMIXCONRETRY environment variables — what they are and how they work.
• Interruption of an SQL request in different APIs, including JDBC, ODBC, etc.
• Informix TCP socket timeout - what it is, why it is necessary, and how it cooperates with the others in different APIs.

Register for this event at http://bit.ly/zFRXbo

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

Compare the Informix Version 11 editions

Get an introduction to the various editions of IBM Informix, and compare features, benefits, and licensing considerations in a side-by-side table. Regardless of which edition you choose, Informix brings you legendary ease of use, reliability, stability, and access to extensibility features.

Also available in: Chinese Chinese Russian Portuguese

06 Jan 2012

For more information go to DeveloperWorks - Informix: http://www.iiug.org/url/devworks.html

IBM has invested heavily in new features of a leaner and meaner Informix V11.7 that is scalable, more reliable, easier to use, and very fast. http://bit.ly/wjul0d.

Informix Growth Edition users most probably noticed a PDQ warning in the message log. The warning message is as follows:

Warning: PDQ functionality is not supported in IDS Growth Edition.
         The value of PDQPRIORITY cannot be set to 10. It is reset to 0

This warning is not an indication of a failure. It is informational only and Informix server continues with normal operation. It just to let user know that PDQ functionality is not available with Growth edition and PDQPRIORITY should set to 0.

This issue started with Informix version 11.50.xC7, when IBM implemented different flavor Informix edition e.g., Growth Edition, Ultimate Edition, Choice Edition etc. All these different editions come with it own advantages and limitations.

You can verify the Informix version using ‘oninit -version’ command. If the Informix build version suffixed with GE (Growth Edition), this warning is an expected behavior.

Typically, tasks related to Auto Update Statistics (AUS) in DB Scheduler starts with default PDQ priority of 10 and on Growth Edition that generates this warning message.

In case you do not want this warning message, you can use following SQL to alter the AUS_PDQ settings:

update sysadmin:ph_threshold set value=0 where name="AUS_PDQ";

Hope this short explanation will address the confusion arises with PDQ warning.

Sanjit Chakraborty

• The IIUG forums at http://www.iiug.org/forums/technical.php **** these are very good****
• Blogs, Videos, News and more at http://planetids.com *** Up to date feeds from many blogs ***
• Informix On Campus http://informixoncampus.blogspot.com/2011/06/faculty-from-regional-universities-at.html
• Martin Fuerderer a blog on Informix Warehouse Accelerator http://tinyurl.com/the-iwa-blog *** New ***
• ognjen.orel http://ifmx.wordpress.com *** New ***
• Keshava Murthy https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/Keshav
• Louis T.Cherian http://louistcherian.wordpress.com/ *** New ***
• Art Kagel's blog http://informix-myview.blogspot.com/
• Andrew Ford's blog http://www.informix-dba.blogspot.com/
• Mark Jamison at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/gbowerman
• Jacques Roy at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/jacquesroy
• Kate Dawson at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/katedawson
• Fernando Nunes at http://informix-technology.blogspot.com/
• Eric Vercelletto at http://www.levillageinformix.blogspot.com/ (in French)
• Mark Scranton at http://markscranton.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/informix-and-marketing/
• IBM DATABASE MAGAZINE at http://www.ibmdatabasemag.com
• The Informix Zone at http://www.informix-zone.com
• There is 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. To join, simply go to http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/25049/5E4B2048E558.

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.