IIUG Insider (Issue #179) May 2015 Other Issues

Highlights: IIUG Informix 2015 sessions are available for download

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
  • Are You Ready for Something Big?
  • IIUG 2016
• Support corner
• RFE corner
• Informix corner
  • Seven new Informix IOT videos
  • WAIUG Meeting — IBM Roadshow 12.10 , Thursday, June 25
• Calendar of events
• Informix resources
  • Informix Blogs and Wikis
  • Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines
• Useful links
• Closing and credits

The 2015 IIUG conference is over and we are already thinking about 2016. Where and when are still in the works, but it will probably be early May and somewhere that is not on the west coast. Currently we are not even sure we will have a conference. But I believe and hope we will. The conference is important not just for the Informix community but for the Informix product as well. I was hoping to meet more of you in San Diego. If you have any ideas how to get more attendees to our next conference please let me know.

Gary Ben-Israel

IIUG Informix 2015 sessions are available for download

To download the sessions from IIUG 2015, login to the IIUG member area. You will find sessions from previous conferences, as well as the latest version of Informix developer edition and lots of other cool stuff. While you are in the member area, please update your profile.

Corrected link for sessions: http://iiug2015.org/training/slides/

NOTE: if you don’t see a session, please contact the speaker and ask them to upload it.

Enjoy.

Gary Ben-Israel

IBM Insight 2015

October 25 — 29, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas NV

Welcome to the premier conference for data and analytics. Explore the newest innovations, industry breakthroughs and hottest trends in analytics, cloud, mobile, the Internet of Things and Watson that you won't find anywhere else. It's not just about the data anymore - it's about getting business insights faster.

Register today and save $700!

The IIUG Conference Planning Committee would like to thank everyone who attended IIUG 2015. It is always great to see old friends and make new friends. We hope you returned home with stronger Informix skills and you picked up some new ideas to take back to work.

We are reviewing your comments from the IIUG 2015 evaluations and will use what we learn to help us make IIUG 2016 an even better event. For those of you who have begun your long range planning, we want to let you know IIUG 2016 will not be the last week in April as it usually is. It will most likely be held during the beginning of May.

We are looking forward to seeing you in 2016!

The IIUG Conference Planning Committee

A ‘sort of’ answer

Once in a while, Support is asked to help determine: "What session is generating all the temporary sort files?" There is no onstat command to answer this, but it can be done in a couple steps:

1. Turn on syssqltrace. Make sure you capture enough trace lines. The value for "Number of traces" in the output of 'onstat -g his' should be under the number of traces you specified, while enabling trace. If 'onstat -g his' shows the number is beyond the value you specified when enabling tracing, it could miss capturing some of the queries that ran.
2. Identify queries that need disk sort space:
    
   select sql_totaltime, sql_statementfrom syssqltrace where sql_sortdisk > 0

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.

Also in the area of IBM website, a new functionality has been released: MyNotifications. You will want to register this webpage in order to receive the notifications of your choice (new product defects, new patch release, new versions etc..., on the frequency of your choice (daily, weekly). I have registered and will definitely keep registered, due to the value of the information delivered.

Register here.

Annual IIUG features survey

Before checking this month's list, do not forget to complete the annual IIUG Features Survey that we have created for you. This survey is a summary of this past year's most significant new features requests from the RFE website for Informix products.

By casting your vote for your favorite Informix new features, you will give extra momentum to those RFEs and contribute to turning them into actual Informix features.

This survey should not take you more than 10 min. The IBM Lab wants to hear from you, don't miss this opportunity!

Visit the survey here.

Things are moving on the RFE website. It is now possible to order the RFE's by 'New' (most recently created or 'Hot' (that received highest number of votes). The good thing is also that now it is easy to identify RFE's in the 'under consideration' status, meaning the ones that are on the way to be implemented. Check the list using the 'Hot' sort and see that RFE's are analyzed by the DEV team and used to implement new functionality. I will now on include the top 5 RFE's and their status.

Do not forget to vote for one or several of those RFE's if they fit your requirements. The more votes, the more chances that the Dev Team will seriously consider the request.

Top 5 RFEs

New RFEs for May 2015

(Login at DeveloperWorks to see the RFEs.)

Allow prioritization of databases with Automatic Update of Statistics
Votes:1
AUS handles all the databases with the same level of priority. Request the possibility to assign priority levels to databases so that important DBs are handled in priority

Add IF NOT EXISTS logic to ALTER TABLE ADD CONSTRAINT
Votes:1
Same use case as CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS. Request the possibility to add IF NOT EXIST for constraints related DDL statements.

ADD CHUNK' OPERATION SHOULD RETURN WARNING THAT LEVEL 0 ARCHIVE NEEDS TO BE ARCHIVED
Votes:2
No warning appear after adding a chunk to a dbspace. Request to add such a warning.

ONCONFIG Parameter to Automatically tune OPTIMIZER for generic Workload (OL...
Votes:4
Since Informix is adding more and more auto-tune features in ONCONFIG, some features should be configured differently if one auto-tunes an OLTP oriented instance OR a DSS oriented instance. Request to add an onconfig parameter to declare whether the instance is more OLTP or DSS, and apply auto-tuning accordingly.

Connection Manager Support for all Possible connection types (DRDA/SQLI/Mon...
Votes:2
Connection manager needs to connect and function with all of the informix data not just the DRDA and SQL data portions. Request to add Json related data server

Shadow Column Creation "online"
Votes:2
Creating a Shadow Column creates an outage. Request the possibility to create ER shadow columns online to avoid this outage and allow smooth migration HDR => ER

Upgrade without outage in HDR environment
Votes:2
Request to upgrade and HDR environment even when doing data conversion, and be able to ALWAYS upgrade the secondary and failover to it with replication in sync.

ALTER owner of database objects after creation
Votes:2
Request the possibility for DBAs to alter the owner of databases and database objects like tables, indexes, triggers etc. through an SQL statement without dropping and re-creating them, like ALTER TABLE foo MODIFY OWNER "new_owner";

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/playlist?list=PLk6uMFltomoP1vaMuuzC_WidC14q50rZc

The Washington DC Area user group meeting.

For more information: http://www.waiug.org

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 ***
• Informix documentation team
• Art Kagel
• Martin Fuerderer
• Eric Vercelletto (In English)
• Just Dave Info *** Informix and other products ***

More Blogs and Wikis

• Fernando Nunes
• ognjen.orel
• IDS Experts blog
• Andrew Ford
• Prasanna A M Informix bits & Pieces
• Prasanna A M Informix - Spatial Technologies
• Vaibhav S Dantale
• Sajan Kuttappa
• Eric Vercelletto (In French)

• 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.