Free IDS Developer Version - A nightmare for other data servers ?
Submitted by eherber on Fri, 2007-10-26 23:36.
Under: application development | cheetah | download | education
We've been waiting for it a long long time, but now a Free IDS Developer Version will soon be downloadable from the following website:
Free IDS Developer Version - A nightmare for other data servers ?
Update 2007-11-07 - Ready for Download
As Fernando Nunes announced in his blog, the new IDS Developer Edition is now available. You can download it from the following URL:
http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/search.jsp?go=y&rs=ifxids
We've been waiting for it a long long time, but now a Free IDS Developer Version will soon be downloadable from the following website:
According to information from IBM the download is planned to be available next week at Oct 31th. The Halloween night is a perfect release date for the free IDS Developer Edition. Developers have now direct access to IBM's most powerful data server that provides superior extensibility combined with incredible scalability as a highly optimized cluster database. I guess the release date will be a nightmare for some other data servers because developers can now test and decide which engine is actually the best one to serve their applications. No doubt that IDS will make the race !!
This also shows that IBM has responded to the demand of the market. Visitors of The Informix Zone have clearly articulated in a past poll that a free IDS version is mandatory:
The free IDS version is only for development purposes and not for deployment in production environments. There are some limitations in this free IDS version:
- 1 CPU VP
- 1 GB of memory
- 8 GB total disk space
- 20 concurrent connections
However the good thing is that all features are included. That means that the full MACH 11 cluster replication technology is available as well as the powerful datablade extensibility technology. And the free edition will be available on a broad range of platforms including:
- IBM AIX® Power PC® 64-bit
- Hewlett-Packard HP-UX PA-RISC 64-bit
- Hewlett-Packard HP-UX Itanium® 64-bit
- Linux® Intel® 32-bit
- Linux Intel AMD 64-bit
- Sun Solaris SPARC 64-bit
- Sun Solaris AMD64/Opteron
- Windows® 2003 32-bit and 64-bit
- Windows XP 32-bit and 64-bit
- Windows Vista (except Home Edition) 32-bit and 64-bit
There is also a MAC port of IDS currently under development at IBM. So the list of platforms for the free IDS Developer Edition will be further enhanced. That gives developers the freedom of choice they need. Most other offerings are limited to the Windows and Linux platforms. IDS leaves it to the Application Developer which platform they prefer.
There is also a new IBM website online now that covers a broad range of themes regarding application development with IDS:
For your convenience I've include the links to the two new IBM websites (IDS Developer Edition and IDS Application Development) as primary links at the top of The Informix Zone website above the search box.
Download, install and test the free IDS Developer Edition and build your own opinion which data server is optimal suited for you application. You will be suprised !!
The Informix Zone will inform you as soon as the free IDS Developer Edition is ready for download.
re: a nightmare for other data servers ?
Submitted by bowerman on Thu, 2008-06-05 20:44.
I installed IDS 11.50.TC1 on Vista for a customer recently and can confirm it works well.
Regarding Help - the problem you encountered is documented in the release notes - you need to download and install winhlp32.exe here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6ebcfad9-d3f5-4365-8070-334cd175d4bb&displaylang=en
The installer prompts for the informix password. However if you enter a password which doesn't conform to the operating system password complexity requirements you could run into a problem and need to re-enter it. If none of the passwords you entered worked and you subsequently deleted the account you will have a problem because manually adding the informix account and making it a member of the Informix-Admin and Administrators groups will not add all the required advanced user rights. I suggest you remove the account, do a full uninstall and install - make sure a valid password is entered at install time.
Once this is done, if you still see a problem in dbaccess - check the machine name in SQLHOSTS (which you can edit via setnet32 or go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Informix\SQLHOSTS\%INFORMIXSERVER%) and remove the leading '*' from the name - which could cause problems in a dual IPV6 and IPV4 environment (this leading * is going away in the next fixpack).
The only problem I encountered when installing 11.50 on Vista was when I created a new instance it didn't add the environment command window to the IDS 11.50 program group in the start menu. This was kind of annoying and I hope it will also be fixed in the next fixpack. To workaround go to %INFORMIXDIR% and run %INFORMIXSERVER%.cmd (I manually created a command window on the desktop that sets this to workaround it).
Hope this helps.. feel free to send messages to my informix-zone account to troubleshoot this further.
Guy
"A nightmare for other data servers ?"
Submitted by eherber on Thu, 2008-06-05 11:20.
I can't say anything about IDS on Windows. Fortunately I didn't have to deal with Windows for the last 10 years :-)
IDS is an excellent product on the Unix and Linux platform, there is not doubt about that.
It might be that IBM has neglected the Windows platform as it is not the dominant platform for running Informix. But I can't comment on that.
I will forward your critics to the right persons inside IBM.
Better late than never
Submitted by Johan Backlund on Sun, 2007-10-28 23:14.
Simply brilliant! Hoping this will make more people see that IDS is still around and still better than most (if not all).
"A nightmare for other data servers ?"
I would call it "nightmare for developers". I'm first time with Informix and it's not good, comparing to Oracle, MySQL or MSSQL. Though download page allege full Vista support, looks like it was never tested there. For example, some help pages from start/programs/Informix... returns funny messages: "this help was compiled for older versions of windows and you can do nothing to view it". Further, probably it's my fault that I can't get IDS running (it returns "25580: System error occurred in network function" in dbaccess), but I believe normal DB server should be easily runnable (take MySQL for instance).
And there is funnier yet to come (assuming you are at windows): it will create new windows user account named Informix with unknown password and administrator privileges! (All passwords I supplied during install do not work.) Though it can be easily deleted, it's certainly the feature no one asked server to do.
This is my 5 cents. Looks like IBM does not respect it's own customers. Right now I'm gonna to delete it and never install back.
Nikita