IIUG Insider (Issue #120) June 2010 Other Issues

Highlights: Join the Panther Early Validation Program

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
  • Join the Panther Early Validation Program
• Education
• Developer corner
  • Informix Chat with the Lab
  • Prepare for Upgrade to IDS 11.50
  • Using Informix for your Warehouse
• Informix corner
  • Data Management Briefing and Luncheon in Denver
  • News from Advanced DataTools
• Informix news
• Informix resources
  • Informix Blogs and things
• Calendar of events
• Useful links
• Closing and credits

Every day I am doing something new with Informix. Taking part in the EVP program for Panther, writing questions for the new Informix Application Developer Test and supporting my development team and users. Last month IBM launched a new pricing model. I received many comments and presented them to IBM.

Please take a few minutes of your time and tell me what you think about the new offering. Is it better or worse, what is missing and what should be changed? Your feedback is important to the IUG board and to IBM.

The nights are getting shorter, at least in the northern hemisphere, so I have less time to write the Insider. Enjoy this light Insider especially suited for hot summer days.

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor
gary@iiug.org

Don't miss the opportunity to gain early access to the next major release of Informix, codenamed Panther. Panther builds on the core strengths of Informix, allowing you to further reduce your costs, deliver more value to customers, and differentiate your solution with the most innovative technology in the database industry.

The major themes of Panther focus on developing powerful and cost-saving features in:

Enhanced Warehousing:

• Smarter and faster DSS processing
• Simplified and accelerated business analytics

Smart Grid:

• Linear scale-out beyond a single cluster; spread workload across systems worldwide
• Reduce operating costs and gain higher utilization of existing global hardware infrastructure by utilizing a mix of hardware in the grid
• Faster time to value with single push-button grid creation and management

Enhanced Programmability

• End-to-end programmability of Informix installation, deployment, configuration, and administration; automate scalable deployment in a cluster, grid, and cloud
• Tighter integration with MQ server
• Improve developer productivity with GUI debugging of SPL

Ease of Embedding:

• Increase reliability and reduce costs with automated administration functions
• Automated installation and easy mass deployment with pre-configured instances
• Increased availability with self-healing features
• Better performance with self-optimization

Enhanced Security Management:

• Reduce time and effort to achieve compliance
• Reduce threats by tracking actual identities in multi-tier applications
• Reduced overall administration of database users

As part of the program, you will be assigned a Lab Advocate, a subject-matter expert from the Informix development lab, who can help you understand how to leverage Informix technology to differentiate your solution in the marketplace. The Lab Advocate will be your single point of contact for all technical and logistical questions related to the beta program. They will be a great resource to help you design and implement your solutions around the new technology and get it done right the first time. Use this unique opportunity to build relationships within the IBM technical community and receive an extra level of care and attention from IBM.

As part of the Early Validation Program, you will be expected to:

• Sign all legal agreements prior to participating in the program
• Report any bugs and testing results through the reporting process
• Have regular communication with your Lab Advocate
• Participate in the exit review with IBM Product Management and complete a survey

The enrollment process is very straightforward. Go to the Informix Early Validation Program website at http://www.ibm.com/informix/beta and submit a nomination form. If you have questions, contact Madhuri Ahuja, Informix EVP Program Coordinator, at ahujam@us.ibm.com.

Since this will be the only beta program being conducted for Panther, I highly encourage you to enroll right away and take advantage of this exclusive opportunity.

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Final month to save on IM Certification! Don't miss out!
Until June 30, candidates who PASS an Information Management Online Assessment Test will receive a 50% off certification voucher good for the corresponding exam. That's a savings of $100 USD! Make sure you don't miss this opportunity to save!

Learn more about Assess and Save!
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Learn more!
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Tuesday, June 13
8:30 AM Pacific
10:30 AM Central
11:30 AM Eastern
4:30 PM London
5:30 PM Paris

Best Practices for Running Informix in VMWare vSphere Virtual Environments

Speaker: Sreeni Paidi (IBM)

IBM Informix is voted #1 in customer satisfaction and it is IBM's flagship database solution for embedded database systems. VMware vSphere is the most widely deployed, production-ready software suite available on commodity hardware for optimizing and managing IT environments through virtualization. In this chat with the labs session we will talk about the best practices in configuring and scaling Informix in a VMWare vSphere 4 environment. We will discuss how to leverage the benefits of server virtualization to achieve near-native database performance with minimal overhead. We will also talk about how you can gain throughput scalability by running multiple virtual machines on a single physical server.

Jerry Keesee, director of Informix worldwide will introduce the call and Sreeni Paidi, Informix Enablement Consultant, Technology Ecosystems will be our technical speaker.

Presentation material will be available at http://www.ibm.com/informix/labchats prior to the event.

Questions, comments: ahujam@us.ibm.com

To register for this event, use the following link:

https://events.webdialogs.com/register.php?id=cae6c6d245&l=en-US

For webinar-specific questions, contact the moderator. For technical support, contact UnyteSupport@us.ibm.com.

Time is running out for IDS 10 products support. Effective September 30, 2010, IBM will withdraw support from the IDS 10 product releases. 25 steps you should consider while upgrading from IDS 10 to 11.50.

1. If necessary, perform Enterprise Replication pre-conversion tasks
2. Check and configure available space
3. Save copies of the current configuration files
4. Close all transactions
5. Shut down and restart the IDS 10 database server in quiescent mode
6. Verify the integrity of the data (onchecks)
7. Verify the database server mode is quiescent (onstat -)
8. If necessary, disable High-Availability Data Replication
9. Make a final level-0 backup of the IDS 10 database
10. Shut down the IDS 10 database server, confirm it is offline (onstat -)
11. On UNIX or Linux, modify kernel parameters as per IDS 11.50
12. Install IDS 11.5
13. Adjust configuration files as necessary
14. Install any new DataBlade modules
15. Set necessary environment variables i.e. ONCONFIG, INFORMIXDIR etc
16. Initialize IDS 11.50 to trigger the conversion
17. Monitor the message log for conversion complete status
18. Do not connect to the database server until conversion has successfully completed
19. Run UPDATE STATISTICS after drop the data distributions
20. Verify the integrity of the data (oncheck)
21. Make an initial level 0 backup of IDS 11.50
22. Tune IDS version 11.50 for performance
23. If necessary, perform Enterprise Replication conversion tasks
24. If necessary, reestablish HDR
25. Register any DataBlade modules that you installed

- Sanjit Chakraborty

Unlock greater business value from your data at lower cost

Achieve faster time to value for data analysis and reporting by bringing the value of Informix to your warehouse applications.

All editions of Informix include a new warehouse capability that provides an integrated and simplified software platform so you can use your existing Informix infrastructure to power business intelligence solutions, using tools that simplify warehouse design and deployment. Use a single database for both transaction processing and analytics or build a separate data warehouse, depending on workload requirements. The new tools make it easy to transform the data to make smarter business decisions and do more with lower cost hardware.

Customers are also realizing up to 80% disk savings with the compression functionality that is available as an add-on to the Informix Warehouse. Learn more about the Storage Optimization Feature and how lower data volumes can improve performance up to 20% and reduce energy expenses.

http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/compression/

IBM and Advanced DataTools Invite you to a Data Management Briefing and Luncheon in Denver.

• Leverage your Data for Better Business outcomes
• Do more with your operational data to drive smarter business decisions

http://www.advancedatatools.com/Events/Den2010/ADTC_IBM_Invite.html

Informix Survey - win an Apple iPad!

IBM Informix Survey for Continuous Availability White Paper

IBM Informix is the database software voted #1 in customer satisfaction. Clients choose Informix because it is reliable, low cost, and hassle free. Solution providers choose Informix for its best-of-breed embeddability. Yet, there are some people that still don't "get" Informix, or realize the many benefits of deploying it. Help us gather data to support this claim.

• Informix is exceptionally hardware efficient, which means that (in the REAL world) you need to spend MUCH less on hardware to get the same performance as other products.
• Informix is exceptionally reliable, which means that (in the REAL world) you don't need to pay lots of people to make sure it stays "up".
• Informix is exceptionally scalable, which means that (in the REAL world) it can be idling one moment and then processing thousands of transactions the next with no apparent stress.

Advanced DataTools is working with Oninit, to gather data about what happens in the REAL world to support these assertions with empirical evidencein the REAL world. The data collected will be used to compile a report that will be made available to every CTO, IT Director and IT Manager. Along with this, they will receive a list of all the major application vendors that are now porting their applications to Informix V11.5 and a document outlining the key reasons to choose Informix.

Win an Apple iPad. One randomly selected participant in the data collection phase of this research will win an Apple iPad, provided by Advanced DataTools Corporation, an Advanced IBM Informix Business Partner.

Complete the Survey to win an Apple iPad! Every response matters. - Start Survey here!

http://www.advancedatatools.com/Informix/Survey.html

Note: Public Sector Employees are not eligible to win but may complete the survey.

Advanced Informix Training by Lester Knutsen and Art Kagel

September 27-30, 2010 - Annandale, VA
November 15-18, 2010 - Annandale, VA

New - Virtual Informix Training over the Internet

Do you want to learn how to be the FASTEST Informix DBA? This is the course our Fastest Informix DBA contest was developed from and will increase your database performance tuning skills. This 4-day course focuses on techniques for optimizing an Informix Database. Labs will demonstrate more than 100% performance improvement. Each student will have a 4-core Linux server with IDS 11 and a large dataset for benchmark exercises and labs. Attend the class in person or online via our Web Training Center. Both Art Kagel and Lester Knutsen will be teaching the Advanced Classes together.

More Information at http://www.advancedatatools.com/Training/InformixTraining.html

Fastest Informix DBA Contest III Winners

Advanced DataTools is pleased to announce the results of our third Fastest Informix DBA contest held at the 2010 IIUG Informix Conference, April 25-28 in Kansas City, Missouri. Thank you to everyone who participated!

This time the contest was an OLTP benchmark using the BenchmarkSQL Java program to generate 100 sessions doing inserts, updates, and deletes against a database. BenchmarkSQL is an easy to use JDBC benchmark that closely resembles the TPC-C standard for OLTP. Databases supported include EnterpriseDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, SQLSvr, MySQL, HsqlDB, Derby/JavaDB & FireBird. See Source Forge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/benchmarksql/ for more information. The Java code was converted to run with Informix by AGS, the folks that created ServerStudio. The challenge was to get the most transactions per minute during a 10-minute benchmark run.

The winners are listed at http://www.advancedatatools.com/Informix/index.html

BT Group Enters Emerging Smart Meter Market
TMCnet - Ed Silverstein - Jun 17, 2010

The Hildebrand solution is powered by IBM (News - Alert) Informix database software, using the Time Series capability. Ed Silverstein is a contributing...

• The IIUG forums at http://www.iiug.org/forums/technical.php **** these are very good****
• Bruce Weed's blog http://bruceweed.wordpress.com/ **** New ****
• Blogs, Videos, News and more at http://planetids.com
• IDS Experts at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/idsteam
• Mark Jamison at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/gbowerman
• Madison Pruet at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/roundrep
• Jacques Roy at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/jacquesroy
• Cathy Elliott at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/InformixVoices
• Informix blogs at http://www.ibmdatabasemag.com/blog/main/archives/informix/index.html
• Kate Dawson at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/katedawson
• Fernando Nunes at http://informix-technology.blogspot.com/
• Virtual Worlds, MMOGs, Serious data - Informix Technology for Persistent Worlds http://informix4virtual.wordpress.com/
• IBM DATABASE MAGAZINE at http://www.ibmdatabasemag.com
• The Informix Zone at http://www.informix-zone.com
• The Informix mag at http://www.informixmag.com/
• IIUG Developers Desktop http://www.iiug.org/devnews/Vol_1_Iss_4/Home.html
• 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.