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.

New: IDS Resource Agent for Linux-HA Clustering

In order to extend the High-Availability (HA) portfolio of IDS, Lars Daniel Forseth, a student of Applied Computer Science at IBM Germany, implemented the IDS Resource Agent for the Open Source Cluster software Linux-HA (aka Heartbeat, http://www.linux-ha.org) in the scope of his diploma thesis.

This IDS Resource Agent enables an HA cluster running on Linux-HA to manage an IDS database server instance as a cluster resource.

Building an unbeatable Performance Appliance

I'm proud to announce an excellent article written by my old friend and Informix fellow Christian Winterhager exclusively for The Informix Zone. Christian has a quiet long history working with Informix, actually he taught me Informix. He programs, teaches and is doing consultancy for Informix products since the middle of the 80's. That's about 20 years now, Informix must be a cult database, no doubt about that.

In his article Christian describes the creation and management of raw devices on Suse Linux.

• Three steps to create a logical volume

• From Logical Volume to Raw device

• A Python-Program for creating dbspaces und raw-devices

How can we make raw devices in Suse Linux? Is there an easy way to build chunks based on raw devices with something like a Logical Volume manager?
The answer is: yes. In this article we learn the basics of LVM2 (created by Heinz Mauelshagen) and how to use it to create raw devices for an informix instance. We will not go through the whole set of LVM-commands but only those which are necessary for handling raw devices.