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Highlights: IBM Mobile Database for Android
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:
For us this is the middle of the New Year Holydays. Our 5773th year started on September 17, followed by Yom Kippur and now Sukkot. No holidays between October 8 and December 9 it is just work, work and more work. Lucky for me at least some of it (the fun part) is Informix.
Our next IIUG board event will be our next board meeting at the IBM Information On Demand Conference in Las Vegas, October 21-25. If you attend the conference, don't miss the Informix party. Attending or not, do not miss the IIUG Informix Conference, which is to be held April 21 - 25, 2013 at the San Diego (CA) Marriott Mission Valley, USA. We have just issued a call for speakers. As a past speaker, believe me, it is worth the effort. Save the date and stay tuned.
Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor
IBM Mobile Database for Android
IBM Mobile Database, the new database offering for Android mobile devices, has gone GA. IBM Mobile Database offers a tight integration between a customer's mobile solution and their existing Informix or DB2 environment. It is being offered as a free-of-charge web download.
The new offering makes it easier for mobile developers to develop and assemble applications for Android devices. Together with the solidDB offering, IBM Mobile Database provides the capability to synchronize data with Informix and DB2 databases.
IBM Mobile Database web page: https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?source=swg-imd
More details:
http://www.unfoldingcode.com/2012/09/mobile-database-for-android-enterprise.html
IIUG Informix Conference 2013 - Call for speakers
Submit a proposal to present at the 2013 International Informix Users Group (IIUG) Conference.
The IIUG Conference Planning Committee is ready to accept presentation proposals for the 2013 IIUG Conference which is to be held April 21 - 25, 2013 at the San Diego (CA) Marriott Mission Valley, USA.
Do you have experience with Informix or Informix related products? Do you have real-case studies related to Informix solutions? Have you discovered any Informix hints or tips? Are you interested in sharing your Informix knowledge and skills with the Informix User community? If the answer is yes to any of these questions the IIUG Conference Committee invites you to submit a proposal to speak at the 2013 Conference.
The 2013 Conference will be comprised of more than 80 technical/user sessions, a series of hands-on-labs and 1 day of comprehensive tutorials intended to reinforce the power of Informix. Presentation proposals should be brief, but more than 250 words, highlighting the Informix technical solutions, real world experiences or trade tips you will include in your presentation. Multiple presentations are encouraged.
If sharing your knowledge is not enough, conference speakers (non IBM employees) are provided with a complimentary pass providing access to conference sessions, meals and conference related networking events. Use http://www.iiug2013.org/speakers to register your proposal. The deadline for submitting 2013 IIUG Conference proposals is November 1, 2012. For your convenience, speaker logins have been retained for those who submitted a 2012 IIUG Conference proposal. Don't delay - submit your proposal and biography today for consideration.
See you in San Diego!
The 2013 IIUG Informix Conference Team
http://www.iiug.org/conf
conference@iiug.org
Information on Demand 2012 Informix Roadmap
Colors
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Elective Sessions |
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Labs |
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Birds of a Feather |
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Monday, October 22
| IDS-1765A |
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Informix Warehouse Accelerator: A Year in Perspective:
Customers have many technology choices that can accelerate their data warehouses. This session will examine technology trends, discuss why customers choose Informix Warehouse Accelerator (IWA), present customer use cases, review applications and summarize lessons learned across a diverse set of customer adoptions. |
| IDS-2612A |
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
How Informix TimeSeries Differentiates the IBM Distribution Grid Monitoring Solution:
IBM Distribution Grid Monitoring (DGM) is a medium and low-voltage grid monitoring and device management system. It offers a visualization interface that can help socialize Smart Grid data with the rest of the enterprise. The extensible data warehouse has powerful analytics that can aid in grid operation and planning. This session will give an overview of DGM and how Informix provides a single platform solution that is designed to meet complex requirements. Informix with the TimeSeries feature strengthens the Historian module by managing operational data efficiently and establishing its referential integrity with context such as network models. The Informix Warehouse Accelerator adds analytical strengths that complement these features. |
| IDS-1888B |
12:45 PM - 01:45 PM
Mandalay Bay South
Convention Center -
Bayside Dining IM BoF Tables 20&21 |
BOF - Achieving High Availability and Scalability Across Heterogeneous Environments:
Exchange challenges, strategies and success stories during these informal discussions over lunch. |
| IDS-1889B |
12:45 PM - 01:45 PM
Mandalay Bay South
Convention Center -
Bayside Dining IM BoF Tables 22&23 |
BOF - Enabling Cost Effective Applications that use Interval (Time Series) or Spatial Data Types:
Exchange challenges, strategies and success stories during these informal discussions over lunch. |
| IDS-1402A |
02:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Mandalay Bay South
Convention Center -
Shorelines B
Lab Rm. 11 |
Hands-On With Informix 11.70: New Features Can Be Implemented Wherever Appropriate:
Attend this session to experience the many new futures that have been introduced in Informix 11.70. These features are designed to enhance the core strengths of Informix: high availability, reliability, scale out, ease of use, simple administration, security and performance. |
| IDS-1052A |
02:15 PM - 03:15 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Informix Warehouse Accelerator: Billion Rows Benchmark Demo:
After one year of using the Informix Warehouse Accelerator there is considerable evidence of its amazingly fast performance. In one set of benchmarks it took 14 minutes to run queries that used to take 9 hours. This session will demonstrate current benchmarks with this exciting new database technology. It will include a demonstration of ad-hoc queries on a bookstore database with 250 million customer records and over a billion sales transaction records in the fact table. Attend this session and learn how to achieve very fast performance with your data warehouse. |
| IDS-2866A |
03:45 PM - 05:00 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
How Informix Clustering Technology Helps European Retailer NKD to Improve Operations and Reduce Costs:
NKD is a rapidly-growing fashion retailer with roughly 1700 stores in central Europe. This presentation will show how NKD is able to use Informix to fulfil its growing availability and scalability demands. The session will explain how a cost-conscious retailer like NKD was able to move to a new Informix version on Linux, thereby improving its IT operation while reducing costs at the same time. The NKD solution combines state-of-the-art hardware technology such as SSDs with new Informix features. For instance, NKD has implemented high availability with a shared disk cluster that allowed them to reduce failover time to just a few seconds. |
Tuesday, October 23
| IDS-3659A |
08:15 AM - 09:30 AM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Informix in the Cloud:
Businesses are embracing the virtualization and automation of cloud computing to help decrease costs and increase the efficiency of their IT departments. Informix offers time-tested characteristics such as stability, low cost of administration and performance, in addition to recent new features. This combination makes Informix an excellent choice for cloud computing applications. Attend this session to explore how a business implementing a private cloud could benefit from Informix Flexible Grid. Attendees will also hear about the new Informix Hypervisor Edition and what it can mean for cloud computing. |
| IDS-1871A |
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
IBM Informix Innovations: Where We Are and Where We Are Going:
Come to this session to hear the Director of Informix Development talk about how the latest Informix innovations are helping Informix win new clients and partners across industries. You will also hear how Informix is uniquely positioned with a critical role among the IBM solutions for big data. The discussion will include a glimpse of the Informix roadmap and strategy that will continue to enable smarter solutions. |
| IDS-1062A |
10:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Mandalay Bay South
Convention Center -
Shorelines B
Lab Rm. 11 |
Hands-On With Informix Warehouse Accelerator:
In March 2011 IBM introduced market-changing data warehouse technology that dramatically enhanced the ability of Informix to operate as a data warehouse or data analysis server. The accelerator technology uses compression and a columnar approach to storing and accessing data in-memory, as opposed to the row-based approach of most database engines. The IBM approach is designed to provide data response times that are hundreds of times faster than those achieved with conventional systems. In this lab, you will have the opportunity to use this technology. |
| IDS-2154A |
11:15 AM - 12:15 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
How the Malaysian Inland Revenue Board Improved Performance with an IBM Informix Genero-Based Framework:
The Inland Revenue Board Malaysia (IRBM) is one of the largest revenue-collecting agencies of the Malaysian government. It is responsible for tax administration for the nation's taxpayers. In 2006, Censof implemented the Standard Accounting System for Government Agencies (SAGA)-compliant Century Financials (Government) at the IRBM. This solution was built on IBM Informix Genero and IBM Informix. The functionality and performance of this solution helped Censof win the subsequent Electronic Revenue Accounting System (e-RAS) project. The e-RAS project was implemented to provide greater efficiency in dealing with the public sector, as outlined in the IRBM Client Charter. |
| IDS-1879B |
12:45 PM - 01:45 PM
Mandalay Bay South
Convention Center -
Bayside Dining IM BoF Tables 17&18 |
BOF - Informix Application Development:
Exchange challenges, strategies and success stories during these informal discussions over lunch. |
| IDS-1875B |
01:15 PM - 02:15 PM
Mandalay Bay South
Convention Center -
Bayside Dining IM BoF Tables 11&12 |
BOF - Accelerating Data Warehouses with Informix:
Exchange challenges, strategies and success stories during these informal discussions over lunch. |
| IDS-3428B |
01:45 PM - 02:45 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Accelerating Data Life Cycle Management With Informix Warehouse Accelerator and Intel Xeon:
IWA works with a snapshot of the data in Informix data mart. Once you have defined the data mart on IWA and loaded the data, you need to periodically refresh the data. You can choose to refresh all of the data or just the partitions that were added, dropped or modified. Whether you have hundreds of gigabytes or many terabytes, faster refresh will help you analyse recent data more rapidly and get closer to real-time business. This session will explain the options for data refresh, review their performance and explain how to correctly implement a refresh plan. IBM and Intel will demonstrate live data refresh on the Intel Xeon platform and examine the impact on performance. |
| IDS-3647B |
03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Informix 11.7 Performance Landscape:
This session will present a detailed overview of Informix 11.7 performance, including new features, tuning and monitoring options, and best practices. |
| IDS-3459A |
04:30 PM - 05:45 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Rapid Application Development With Informix Genero: Additional Benefits for New Applications:
You have heard about the benefits of Informix Genero for modernizing 4GL, but what about using Genero for new application development? Genero provides all of the expected benefits of developing in a 4th-generation language, including simple constructs for working with your Informix database. This session explores the capabilities of the Genero graphical development environment, and how it streamlines the development process. If you are developing new apps for mobile, web or the desktop, Informix Genero should be on your shortlist. |
Wednesday, October 24
| IDS-1786A |
10:30 AM - 01:30 PM
Mandalay Bay South
Convention Center -
Shorelines B
Lab Rm. 11 |
Modernizing 4GL Applications and Providing Web Services Using IBM Informix Genero:
The lab will give users an understanding of IBM Informix Genero. Attendees will learn how to modernize existing 4GL applications with minimal user interaction. They will also see how Informix Genero is designed to help you develop applications once, and then deploy them over the web, on mobile devices, on desktops and more. The session will present case studies ranging from simple to complex, and will also explain the IBM experience and best practices for using Informix Genero. |
| IDS-3055A |
10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Using Informix Warehouse Accelerator to Accelerate Data Warehousing at Westfleisch:
Data warehouses must simultaneously provide fast answers to user queries while maintaining a low total cost of ownership. This presentation shows how one of the top five meat marketers in Europe, Westfleisch, employed Informix Warehouse Accelerator (IWA) to achieve these two goals. The project followed a 2011 proof-of-concept and decision by Westfleisch to move their data warehouse to IWA. This session will describe how this task was performed and what lessons were learned. |
| IDS-3560A |
12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Informix TimeSeries and Informix Spatial: What are Database Extensions and How Can I Use Them?:
Informix includes support for special data types such as interval (time series) data and spatial data. Applications utilizing these data types are becoming increasingly popular across industries. This session will discuss several use scenarios and answer the kinds of questions that arise when considering special data types. How can existing applications be enhanced to use location data or interval data? How much work is involved? What will it cost? What should we think about when designing a new spatial or time series application? Finally, the discussion will address the extensibility of the Informix database. |
| IDS-1875B |
01:15 PM - 02:15 PM
Mandalay Bay South
Convention Center -
Bayside Dining IM BoF Tables 11&12 |
BOF - Accelerating Data Warehouses with Informix:
Exchange challenges, strategies and success stories during these informal discussions over lunch. |
| IDS-4202A |
02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Pronto Xi, Informix and IBM Cognos 10 - Designing integrated ERP and real-time BI for Mid-Market:
Pronto Software was the first ERP vendor globally to release a fully integrated package of ERP and Cognos 10 BI. We'll discuss how it was done and how we leveraged the IBM Informix Database to provide simultaneous transactional and real time business intelligence in a single seamless environment. The World has moved from simple, static reporting to dynamic, real-time dashboards, widgets and reports. Learn how Pronto has integrated the three pillars of this solution: Pronto ERP application, IBM Informix and IBM Cognos BI from a technical, change management and market perspective to provide a world leading solution in the mid-market. |
| IDS-1935A |
03:45 PM - 04:45 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Getting the Most From Informix Compression and Other Storage Optimization Features:
To get the most out of Informix Storage, you should utilize exciting new features such as data compression and index compaction. If you understand how to optimize data and index storage, your disk drives essentially work for you. Attend this session to learn how these new features can help you reduce backup times, improve query performance and lower administration costs. |
| IDS-2762A |
05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Retail Management System With Embedded Informix Database:
This session will discuss how the Avanti retail management system, with Informix as its underlying database, has helped many retail customers to implement a faster solution, save record maintenance costs and offer an easy-to-operate system. |
Thursday, October 25
| IDS-1504A |
08:15 AM - 09:30 AM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Accelerating Business Process Management with Informix 11.7:
IBM BPM 7.5 has a process instance repository, but sometimes it is necessary to interact with an external database. The Maricopa County Attorney's office has integrated BPM 7.5 with Informix 11.7 and found the performance to be substantially faster than what their prior system achieved. This session will explore why. |
| IDS-1581A |
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Improving Performance With Query Rewrite and External Tables:
This session will explore two areas of Informix that are important for achieving maximum performance: query rewrite and external tables. Attendees will learn various techniques for doing query rewrite and hear about its use in different customer environments. The session will also cover internals of external tables and why it is important to replace many existing tools. Attend this session to hear about the most important factors to consider when using external tables to make your environment better, faster and more efficient. |
| IDS-2717A |
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Delivering True Offline Capabilities to Mobile Devices With IBM solidDB and Worklight:
The prevalence of mobile devices presents a unique challenge for businesses to deliver their capabilities by fully engaging their users. The fidelity of application interaction on these devices becomes extremely important. This presentation will cover how you can achieve this fidelity for any mobile app developed by utilizing IBM solidDB and the first-class MEAP (mobile enterprise app platform), IBM Worklight. This session will also explore how you can maintain interaction fidelity for mobile apps while achieving true offline capabilities such as security, maximum storage, a familiar programming model and sync when connectivity is available. You will witness a real-world scenario of a Mobile app built using Worklight and utilizing solidDB. |
| IDS-1932A |
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
The Informix Graphical OpenAdmin Tool for OATs:
This session will help participants understand the capabilities and architecture of OAT, the OpenAdmin Tool for Informix. The discussion will include an overview of the capabilities of OAT, highlighting such features as replication, query tracing, storage optimization, performance history graphs, auto-update statistics and space management, along with many other capabilities. |
| IDS-2397A |
03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Best Practices for Embedding Informix in a Constrained Environment:
One of the primary strengths of Informix is its hands-free administration. This means Informix is often the best choice for an embedded application. In this session, articipants can learn about the best practices for embedding Informix in a constrained environment where resources are limited. Informix customers could also reduce their overall administration cost by taking advantage of features that make Informix embeddable. |
| IDS-2762A |
05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Mandalay Bay North
Convention Center -
Tradewinds D |
Retail Management System With Embedded Informix Database:
This session will discuss how the Avanti retail management system, with Informix as its underlying database, has helped many retail customers to implement a faster solution, save record maintenance costs and offer an easy-to-operate system. |
Information On Demand 2012 Updates:
- Explore Big Opportunities at Information On Demand 2012: For IBM Business Partners, Information On Demand 2012 offers new ways to discover big ideas and create a big future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQAWAfUU2t4
- Jason Silva - television personality, filmmaker and philosopher - gives a sneak preview of IBM Information On Demand 2012, the conference of the year to "Think Big." Hundreds of sessions, great networking opportunities, meetings with product experts and IBM executives - all at Information On Demand 2012. To learn more or to register: http://ibm.co/ibmiod12
New in DeveloperWorks
Open Source Big Data for the Impatient, Part 1: Hadoop tutorial: Hello World with Java, Pig, Hive, Flume, Fuse, Oozie, and Sqoop with Informix, DB2, and MySQL
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-1209hadoopbigdata/index.html
This article is focused on explaining Big Data and then providing simple worked examples in Hadoop, the major open-source player in the Big Data space. You'll be happy to hear that Hadoop is NOT a replacement for Informix or DB2, but in fact plays nicely with the existing infrastructure. There are multiple components in the Hadoop family and this article will drill down to specific code samples that show the capabilities. No Elephants will stampede if you try these examples on your own PC.
Stored procedures used in callable and prepared statements
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-1209storedprocedures/index.html
To improve the performance of a relational database application, it is normal to use stored procedures, which are nothing but user-defined functions containing a series of SQL statements stored in database. In this article we are going to demonstrate how to access a Stored Procedure using callable statements with the Informix JDBC driver. JDBC CallableStatement extends the PreparedStatement and sends the request to server to execute a Stored Procedure for complex operations (such as returning values or using input and output Stored Procedure parameters).
For more information go to DeveloperWorks - Informix: http://www.iiug.org/url/devworks.html
Articles
Financial
IBM and TransWorks Collaborate to Help Louisiana-Pacific Corporation Achieve Supply Chain Efficiency
...The new system, deployed on IBM Informix Dynamic Server and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software running on IBM Power Systems servers, transports messages and automatically processes load offerings to LP’s carriers and tracks the progress of each load, while maintaining constant integrated communications between the carriers and shippers...
http://www.iiug.org/url/news_financial.html
IBM Data Management
Supercharging the data warehouse while keeping costs down: IBM Informix Warehouse Accelerator (IWA) delivers superior performance for in-memory analytics processing
http://ibmdatamag.com/2012/08/supercharging-the-data-warehouse-while-keeping-costs-down/
Videos
Business Analytics in a Blink: Many great milestones in information management have come from the IBM Almaden Research Center, including the invention of the relational database and the first data mining algorithms. Another ground-breaking project to recently come from the Almaden Research Center is "Blink". The Blink project's ambitious goal was to answer all Business Intelligence queries in mere seconds, regardless of the database size and without having to define any performance layer.
Watch the video to know more: http://youtu.be/xJd8M-fbMI0
Watch the complete video on upgrading to the latest Informix - performance, autonomic and high availability enhancements galore!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K0cHhzX_U4&feature=youtu.be
What is purpose of the 'deadlock' mutex which can be seen in 'onstat -g spi' output?
The 'deadlock' mutex ensures that there is never be more than one session checking for a deadlock situation at any given time. Whenever some lock is requested due to the LOCK MODE set to WAIT [seconds] statement used by a session, the code for deadlock checking get executed.
The deadlock checking code starts with marking all the sessions in the instance with an internal flag saying 'not in deadlock'. Then it walks through the list of all the locks held by the current session (including the newly requested one) and for each lock it identifies whether there are some sessions waiting for it. If such a session (called waiter) is found, its internal flag changed to 'deadlock candidate' and the waiter added into the so called 'deadlock list'. Each of the waiters in this list is then checked in the same way - the code checks whether any of the waiters holds any lock the current session is waiting for. If such a lock is found a deadlock is detected.
Each execution of the deadlock checking code depends on a consistent state of the internal 'deadlock' flag in each session. In other words there can't be more sessions checking for the deadlock at the same time, as they would overwrite that internal flag mutually. To ensure this, each session has to acquire the 'deadlock' mutex before the deadlock checking code can be executed and release it once the deadlock detection is finished.
- Tomas Zahradnik
New RedBook
Solving Business Problems with Informix TimeSeries
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248021.html
Roadshows
- Nov 5-6 2012 Auckland, New Zealand
- Nov 8-9 2012 Wellington, New Zealand
The agenda and materials for the events are found on a link off of this page, which is also here:
http://www.iiug.org/url/roadshows.html
Awards
Congratulations to Sitaram & Ajay from #IBM #Informix SQL team who have earned the patent filing awards. Thanks a lot for your efforts Sitaram and Ajay, you make us proud.
Read more at: http://yfrog.com/obn8srtrj#tfeDh1G6ToR1FYJS.99
Announcement
Announcement on software support discontinuance for IBM Informix V11.10: Effective September 30, 2012, IBM will withdraw support for the Program release# 5724-L23, Program release name - IBM Informix Enterprise Edition, Workgroup Edition, Express Edition program, licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement.
For more details visit: http://www.iiug.org/url/discontinuance_11.10.html
Bootcamps
Informix blogs and things
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.
| Sources: | |
IIUG Board of Directors
IBM Corp. |
| Editors: | |
Gary Ben-Israel
Rhonda Hackenburg |
For comments, please send an email to gary@iiug.org.
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