New Ruby/Informix Website

If you are an Informix fan - you probably are as you are visiting The Informix Zone - and you are looking for a powerful, easy to learn and robust programming language, take a deeper look at Ruby. Combined with the Ruby on Rails framework, Ruby is an extremely efficient language for developing web based applications. Applications that probably need a high performance OLTP cluster database like IDS.

Webcast: Optimizing IDS Performance

Update 2008-04-09 - Presentation download

The presentation can be downloaded thru the following URL:

Optimizing IDS Performance

• Date: Tuesday, April the 8th
• Time: 1.5 hour -- 8 AM PST, 10 AM Central, 11 AM Eeastern, 4 PM London, 5 PM Paris, 5 PM Berlin
• Title: Optimizing IDS Performance

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Neue Ausgabe des IBM/Informix Newsletters

Im Newsletter-Archiv befindet sich die neueste Ausgabe (03/2008) des INFORMIX-Newsletters.

Inhaltsverzeichnis der Ausgabe Maerz 2008:

• Aktuelles
• TechTipp: Environments - DBREMOTECMD
• TechTipp: Environments - IFX_PAD_VARCHAR
• TechTipp: Environments - USETABLENAME
• TechTipp: Waiting for next logical log file to be freed
• TechTipp: Logical Log Files are Full -- Backup is Needed

Haste makes Waste - Stored Procedure Recompilation

During the study of the release notes of the new IDS 10.00.FC8 version I noticed a long anticipated feature that already made it into IDS 10.00.FC7:

Enhanced Concurrency after Recompilation of SPL Routines

The problem of locked rows in the dictionary table sysprocplan is something that comes up in many IDS installations that work intensively with stored procedures. The recommendation to reoptimize the stored procedures manually after DDL changes - update statistics for procedure - helps to avoid the problem but is more a kind of a workaround and is often forgotten by the administrator or application developer.

Download Carlton Doe's IDS 11 Book

You can now download IBM IDS 11 - The next Generation in OLTP Data Server Technology as an eBook from the following IBM Website:

• Download: Carlton Doe's IDS 11 (eBook)

Please spread the news and recommend this free offer to your colleagues !!

SMI Query Series - Shared Memory Segments

The sysmaster interface (SMI) presents a comfortable way to extract information about various parts of your running IDS instance. This information can be used for:

• ad hoc analysis of performance problems
• determining the status of several IDS sub components
• monitoring replication metrics
• sampling data for capacity planning purposes

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Neue Ausgabe des IBM/Informix Newsletters

Im Newsletter-Archiv befindet sich die neueste Ausgabe (02/2008) des INFORMIX-Newsletters.

Inhaltsverzeichnis der Ausgabe Februar 2008:

• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• Aktuelles
• TechTipp: IDS 11 Installation
• Open Admin Tool ( OAT ) auf Linux
• TechTipp: SQL - SPL: Find Position of Substring
• TechTipp: SMI Sysmaster Interface - sysptnhdr (Extents)

Webcast: Geographic Mashups

• Date: Wednesday, Feb 27th, 2008
• Time: 1.5 hours -- 8 AM PST, 10 AM Central, 11 AM Eeastern, 4 PM London, 5 PM Paris, 5 PM Berlin
• Title: Geographic mashups: Bringing a spatial dimension to your Web applications
• Speaker 1: Robert Uleman, Consulting IT Specialist, IBM
• Speaker 2: Alan Caldera, Senior Software Engineer, IBM

Do your enterprise applications include the next level of information for business 

SMI Query Series - Database Size

The sysmaster interface (SMI) presents a comfortable way to extract information about various parts of your running IDS instance. This information can be used for:

• ad hoc analysis of performance problems
• determining the status of several IDS sub components
• monitoring replication metrics
• sampling data for capacity planning purposes

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Neue Ausgabe des IBM/Informix Newsletters

Im Newsletter-Archiv befindet sich die neueste Ausgabe (01/2008) des INFORMIX-Newsletters.

Inhaltsverzeichnis der Ausgabe Januar 2008:

• Aktuelles
• TechTipp: IDS 11 - Installation Open Admin Tool ( OAT ) auf Windows
• TechTipp: SMI - Sysmaster Interface - sysonlinelog
• TechTipp: SMI - Sysmaster Interface - Eigenschaften der Datenbanken
• TechTipp: Optionen des ONSTAT (onstat -g dis)

Webcast: Informix Roadmap and Future

Update 2008-01-30 - Presentation Download

You can download this presentation and the other presentations from the Chat with the Lab series here:

IBM IDS V11 (Cheetah) - Webcasts

• Date: Wednesday, Jan 30th, 2008
• Time: 1.5 hour -- 8 AM PST, 10 AM Central, 11 AM Eeastern, 4 PM London, 5 PM Paris, 5 PM Berlin
• Title: Informix Roadmap and Futures
• Speaker: Jerry Keesee, Director of the Informix Lab

New DeveloperWorks Article

There is an interesting new article written by Carlton Doe on IBM developerWorks. The article compares the different editions of IDS:

• IDS DE (Developer Edition)
• IDS Express (Express Edition)
• IDS WGE (WorkGroup Edition)
• IDS EE (Enterprise Edition)

The article clearly describes which features are included in each edition and which ones can be separately purchased if needed. This is also a good overview about the rich functionality that IDS offers to a broad range of different applications and environments:

SMI Query Series - Sequential Scans on Tables

The sysmaster interface (SMI) presents a comfortable way to extract information about various parts of your running IDS instance. This information can be used for:

• ad hoc analysis of performance problems
• determining the status of several IDS sub components
• monitoring replication metrics
• sampling data for capacity planning purposes

MACH 11 - Setup a SDS Node in 5 Minutes

If you didn't had the time to play with the SDS (Shared Disk Secondary) functionality which is part of the MACH 11 technology introduced in IDS 11, here is a short summary how to setup a SDS node on the same machine. It will take you only about 5 minutes to get the SDS node up and running.

I assume that you already have an IDS 11 instance running on your machine. If not, download the cost-free IDS Developer Edition:

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Neue Ausgabe des IBM/Informix Newsletters

Im Newsletter-Archiv befindet sich die neueste Ausgabe (12/2007) des INFORMIX-Newsletters.

Inhaltsverzeichnis der Ausgabe Dezember 2007:

• Aktuelles
• Performance
• TechTipp: IDS 11 auf Linux
• TechTipp: SMI - Sysmaster Interface - sysnetworkio
• TechTipp: Optionen des ONSTAT (onstat -g ntt / ntu)
• TechTipp: IDS 11 - Installation unter AIX 5.3 64-bit

Daily Backup via DB Scheduler

Applications that embed the database as part of their solution have challenging requirements regarding the data server:

• a customizable, small footprint
• a hardware gentle architecture
• rock-solid reliability
• flexible high availability options
• extremely low administration overhead
• smoothly backward application compatibility
• excellent performance

If you look at each of those requirements it becomes clear why IBM favors IDS as the data server of choice for integrated solutions. The new database scheduler introduced in IDS V11 offers extensive possibilities to automate routine tasks. Probably one of the most important DBA routine tasks is the regular backup of the data server.

The IDS High-Performance Loader

• Date: Monday, Dec 17th, 2007
• Time: 1 hour -- 8 AM PST, 10 AM CST, 11 AM EST, 4 PM London, 5 PM Paris, 5 PM Berlin
• Title: The IDS High-Performance Loader
• Speaker: Robert Beal, Senior Field Sales Technical specialist

You can register for the webcast here...

One of the hidden treasurers of IDS is the High-Performance Loader. 

IDS 11 Book ready to order via Amazon

If you didn't have the chance to get hold of the great new Informix Book (IBM IDS 11 - The Next Generation in OLTP Data Server Technology) written by IBM Informix specialist Carlton Doe you can now order it via amazon.com:

IBM IDS 11 - The Next Generation in OLTP Data Server Technology

IDS 11 scales perfectly on Linux

In a recent benchmark testing Informix Dynamic Server proved it's superb scalability once again. The test has been performed with IDS 11.10 running on Suse Linux Enterprise Server 64-Bit powered by an IBM System z model.

IDS 11.10 showed 20% better performance compared to IDS 9.40. Beside the performance advantage, IDS 11.10 demonstrated near linear scalability by being able to deploy 15.3 of total 16 CPU's productively. A great result that once again demonstrates the superiority of IBM's OLTP flagship data server and it's core multithreading technology.

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Neue Ausgabe des IBM/Informix Newsletters

Im Newsletter-Archiv befindet sich die neueste Ausgabe (11/2007) des INFORMIX-Newsletters.

Inhaltsverzeichnis der Ausgabe November 2007:

• Aktuelles
• TechTipp: IDS 11 - Backup in ein Verzeichnis mit ONTAPE
• TechTipp: IDS 11 - Continuous Log Restore
• TechTipp: IDS 11 - Backup & Restore Filter
• TechTipp: Optionen des ONSTAT (onstat -g buf)
• TechTipp: Aktuell verfügbare Releases