IIUG Insider (Issue #222) January 2019

Highlights: Elections for the IIUG Board of Directors starts February 11

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:

1) Editorial

Having a busy month ahead:

  • IIUG board elections.
  • IBM Think conference.
  • IIUG board meeting.

I will give you a detailed report in the next Insider.

Gary Ben-Israel

IIUG Insider Editor

IIUG Board of Directors

gary@iiug.org

2) Highlights

2.1 Elections for the IIUG board of directors starts February 11

The IIUG is electing a new board of directors. If you want to influence, please vote.

Stay tuned. Read our emails and follow our website for more information and details about the nominees.

Standing for election are (By alphabetical order)

Gary Ben-Israel
Miguel Carbone
Rhonda Hackenburg
Art Kagel
Cindy Lichtenauer
David Link
Ognjen Orel
Vicente Salvador
Bruce Simms
Eric Vercelletto

The timetable is:

    • Feb 11 2019 – Election starts
    • Feb 25 2019 – Election ends
    • Mar 11 2019 – Election Result Officially Declared
    • Mar 12 2019 – New board term starts

Gary Ben-Israel

3) Conference Corner

3.1 IBM Think 2019: February 12-15, San Francisco, USA

Sharpen your skills. Get hands-on experience with the latest technology. Extend your professional network into one of the world’s most celebrated communities of technologists and thought leaders. And have some fun while you’re at it. https://www.ibm.com/events/think/

Community Day, February 11.

Back by popular demand, Community Day will kick off the week at Think 2019 for those interested in cloud, data analytics, security and resiliency. IBM clients, Champions, and community members will gather together to network, share best practices with each other, and learn from IBM product experts. To participate in Community Day, register for Think 2019 and select cloud, data analytics, security or resiliency as your topic of interest.

Gary Ben-Israel

4) Informix Corner

4.1 Informix 14 features

Enhances log replay performance of remote secondary servers and OLTP transactions

      • Up to 5x improvement in replication enables client applications to sustain near zero latency between primary and secondary servers allowing faster recovery time objective in disaster scenarios.
      • Up to 10% faster than 12.10 for standard OLTP transactions

Provides higher security for encryption keys and integrated backup encryption

      • By supporting remote storage of encryption at rest keys in Amazon Key Manager, an additional layer of security is applied to Informix server encrypted data. Three ciphers AES128, AES192 and AES256 are supported.
      • By supporting remote key management server to generate encryption keys and reducing DBA effort to encrypt Informix data backups, data security in backup media is enhanced without the risk of losing keys. The encryption key is itself encrypted (called Envelop Encryption).
      • Transport Layer Security (TLS) to 1.2 for a higher level of network transport security.

Enhances usability, streamlines administration, and increases uptime

      • By supporting additional in-place alter operations on tables and data types, database downtime is avoided

Provides a new centralized and graphical administration tool called InformixHQ

      • InformixHQ is a modern web console for visualizing, monitoring, and managing your Informix server instances. It is purpose built for ease-of-use, scale-out, and optimizing DevOps needs.
      • It provides critical performance management capabilities, monitoring how key performance metrics are changing overtime and tracking how efficiently Informix is running your workload even when you’ve stepped away from your screen. Its monitoring system feeds directly into a customizable alerting system so you can be immediately alerted via email, Twilio, or PagerDuty whenever an issue occurs on one of your Informix database server instances.
      • It is designed to be scalable to efficiently manage and monitor as many Informix database server instances as you run.
      • It enables collaboration between the DBAs, the app developers, the ops engineers, and management and accessed from any desktop, laptop, or mobile device.
      • InformixHQ is the path forward for graphical monitoring, alerting, and administration of your Informix database servers.

Enhances Unicode support to current V11.0

      • Ability to support storage and processing for text characters that are new over the last 10 years. The new scripts and characters in Version 11.0 add support for lesser-used languages and unique written requirements worldwide.

Enhances time series granularity and spatial projection

      • Supporting Sub-second timestamps allow for very high speed event generation
      • Support for more geodetic and projections systems enables you to track packages in a shipping depot using your own coordinate system

Increased hardware limits at the Workgroup Edition level

      • New limits 24 cores / 32GB RAM enable higher performance and scalability for your critical applications providing even higher return on your Informix investment.

Includes storage optimization at the Enterprise Edition level

      • All Informix Enterprise edition deployments now benefit from the well proven data compression technology already built in Informix.
      • Data compression reduces primary, secondary, backups and log storage while simultaneously enhancing performance by reducing I/O operations.
      • Customers have reported average 4x reductions in database size while experiencing faster I/O operations and faster backups.

Common table expression

      • By implementing the SQL standard CTE, application developers improve readability and maintenance of complex queries, able to re-use CTE result-set multiple times in one query, Pipeline aggregations and write powerful recursive queries.
      • Complex queries can be divided into simple, ad hoc, logical building blocks. These simple blocks can then be used to build more complex, interim CTEs until the final result set is generated.

Setting up Informix instance/or database level replication using Enterprise Replication

      • Single command that automates setting up of Enterprise Replication and data migration between two Informix server instances located either on-prem or in the cloud. This command automates tasks such as defining Enterprise Replication domain between the two servers, adding key columns for the tables, creating required storage spaces for the databases, copying database schema from source server to target serve, creating replicate definitions and finally synchronizing data between source and target server instances, all in a transactional, flexibly phased manner, with no downtime.

4.2 Petrosoft video and case study

The Petrosoft reference video is now live and available on our IBM case studies page, please promote on your social channels and prospects!

Video: https://ibm.co/2FoNXIM

Case Study: https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/petrosoft

5) RFE Corner

IBM created a public website to collect the requests for new features directly from users. The RFE (Requests For Enhancements) Has been assigned by IBM to the IIUG.

We are working on setting a new RFE site. All data from the IBM site will be transferred.

Stay tuned.

Gary Ben-Israel

6) Informix Resources

IBM Informix home page www.informix.com or directly at: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/

IBM Informix community https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSGU8G_12.1.0/com.ibm.community.doc/community.htm

6.1 Informix Blogs and Wikis

Blogs and Wikis that have been updated during the last month

More Blogs and Wikis

6.2 Social Media

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/25049

Twitter : https://twitter.com/iiug

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/IIUG.Informix

Informix IoT Channel : https://ibm.biz/BdH2nm

6.3 Forums, Groups, Videos, and Magazines

      • The IIUG forums at /forums/technical.php
      • Informix Marketing channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/informixmarketing?feature=results_main
      • IBM DATABASE MAGAZINE at http://www.ibmdatabasemag.com
      • Credentials, the IBM Certification Newsletter at
        http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/email/201307credentials.shtml
      • There is now an 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. To join, simply go to: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/25049/5E4B2048E558

Closing and Credits

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 Information 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.

Editor: Gary Ben-Israel

For comments, please send an email to gary@iiug.org

Published
Categorized as Insider

By Vicente Salvador

Board member since 2014, a user since 1989 and Informix fan. I'am software architect which allow me to combine technical and business skills.