Jacques Roy is an IDS technical product manager as part of IDS development. He has written books and articles on Informix particularly in the are of database extensibility. The postings on this site are his own and do not represent positions, strategies or opinions of IBM.

Looking Forward

Lately I've had a lot of internal discussions about features, benefits, and qualities of Informix Dynamic Server version 11. Two characteristics tht came up were the fact that IDS can be invisible and that Informix is everywhere. Humm... everywhere and invisible... we could do a lot of jokes about that... but I don't want to be in the doG house

We just closed the second quarter of 2009. A lot happened during that period: we had the Informix conference, the release of IDS 11.50.xC4, Informix Warehouse, and Storage Optimization with deep compression. Of course that does not even include IDS 11 training sessions given around the world, proof of concepts, customer discussions, many upgrades, and multiple production implementations of the latest features.

So, what do we have in store for the second half? I can't really tell you .

There are two things that are pretty obvious that I can mention: IDS 11.50.xC5 will likely come out in the second half and the end of support for IDS 7.31 is September 15. That should not come as a surprise since IDS 7.31 has not been sold since September 2008. It had quite a long life (IDS 7.31. was released in 1999, last millennium!).

I'm hoping that all 7.31 customers are already working on the upgrade (you can upgrade directly from 7.31 to 11.50). Since IDS 11.50 is a superset of 7.31, that's should provide a minimum of inconvenience. Then they will be able to take advantage of all the performance improvements and all the new features that makes IDS even easier to use and manage. I really believe that people that are happy with IDS 7.31 will be impressed with all the improvements in 11.50.

People on IDS 10.0 should start thinking about moving to 11.50.

If you have any questions about going from 7.31, 9.4, or 10.0 to IDS 11, don't hesitate to contact your local IBM Informix expert.

A new watch

If you've read my last entry, you know what happened with my watch while I was in Strasbourg. Considering that I have had that watch for a long time, I decided that it was time to replace it with a newer model so I spent $35 for the latest version of the same watch. My watch had run its time.

You must be wondering why I'm talking about a watch in an Informix blog . Informix (IDS) being a software product keeps on running. The bits don't wear out. Or do they?

Contingency plan

Last week I stayed at a quaint hotel in Strasbourg. Since the room did not have an alarm clock, I decided to use my watch to wake me up on Monday morning. Considering that there is an eight-hour timezone difference between Denver and Strasbourg, using an alarm is a good idea.

I woke up on Monday 30 minutes before the alarm was supposed to ring. That's long enough to make it worthwhile falling asleep again so I did. I woke up again with a start, picked up my watch and looked at the time: the display was blank!I needed to find out what time it was in a hurry. Maybe I was late for the start of the class! Luckily for me, it turned out that it was the time I was planning to get up at. I guess my brain kept track of the time as I was sleeping. It has worked in the past but I don't find this method the most reliable. At this point, I started using my phone as my alarm clock.

Later that week, when I was in Paris, I had to go visit a partner. The sales specialist send me the information. I wrote the address down on a piece of paper and went to grab a taxi. The taxi driver could not find the place even with the use of a GPS device. I did not have access to my email with my laptop, I did not write down the partner's phone number and I had no way to contact anybody. I was about to tell the driver to turn around when I remember that I get my emails on my phone. Luckily, there was a phone number and we were able to get to the right location.

Twice in one week! Since I had to leave my hotel on Saturday at 5:00am, I did not want to take any chances: I setup a wake up time on both my phone and on the television/alarm clock. Surely at least one of the two would work. It turns out that both worked that morning and 20+ hours later I was back at home (ahh! the glamor of travel). Now my laptop appears to act a little strange. I better do a backup...

That made me think: Do all Informix DBAs have a contingency plan? What happens if something goes wrong? How much does it cost the business for each hour of downtime?

IDS offers a lot of capabilities that can address the needs of a business environment. It starts with online backup either full or incremental and adds to it through the following:

• Continuous Availability Feature (CAF): This provides the ability to share the disks so instances on different machines (or blade) use the same database space. This is great to quickly recover from machine failure since the database is accessible through another machine. Since all machines access the data simultaneously, it can also provide horizontal scalability
• High-Availability Data Recovery (HDR): Provides disaster recovery through the replication of the data to another instance.
• Remote Secondary Server (RSS): Adds to the HDR story by supporting additional copies of the data into other instances
• Continuous Log Restore (CLR): You can automate the restore of IDS into another instance so that instance is ready to be put online if needed in the case of a disaster on the production machine
• Enterprise Replication (ER): Gives you the ability to distribute the data over hundreds of instances to have distributes work and redundant data.

All these options work together. Talk to your local IBM-Informix IT specialists if you want to know more about these capabilities.

Strasbourg: Day 3

The machines configurations caused problems in using Data Studio with WAS CE, I already mentioned that yesterday. This also meant that we could not do the web services lab. To work around this problem, I spent a few minutes showing the students what was involved in creating a web service using the vmware image on my laptop. Of course, it took a lot less time than would be required to do the lab since everything was already setup.

The rest of the class went well. It included a review of the enterprise features such as backup, SDS, HDR, RSS, CLR, ER, CDC (Change Data Capture), and MQ integration. I think we should add a lab on shared disk and HDR since the labs appear to be very well received. They are more fun than just sitting there listening to a speaker. The class ended with a prsentation on cloud computing.

I went through the evaluation and found that the class was a success. I know there are a few adjustments but it was a good start. All in all, it was a good few days.

I took the train to Paris. It takes around 2 hours 15 minutes to cover the 500 kilometers between Strasbourg and Paris. That's an average of over 220 km per hour. The ride was so smooth. It is interesting to note that a plane ride would have taken one hour but the train is actually faster since you can get there just a few minutes before departure and it drops you off in the middle of Paris instead of the "far away" Charles De Gaulle Airport. That's a reminder that we should always use the right tools for the right problem

Strasbourg: Day 2

Second day of class in Strasbourg. It started well: I covered IDS extensibility and the students went through the lab without more serious problems than misspelling and keyboard issues.

Life was good until we got to Data Studio..

I went through the presentation quickly since all the students said they were familiar with eclipse. We then moved on to the lab. Fifteen minutes into the lab, most students were still waiting for Data Studio initialization to complete. For some, it took much longer. All that to say that the lab machines were under-configured in memory. I should have mentioned that the lab machines needed at least 1GB of memory and not only 512MB.

Despite the memory problems, most student were able to get through the lab. I suspect that it will be impossible to do the lab on web services since we also need to start WAS CE in addition to Data Studio.

We continued with a discussion on OO and databases followed by a review of web environments with more emphasis on application servers. These went quicker since, as expected, students covered the OO approach in detail during their years at the university. this was a good thing since we were behind in my original schedule.

the day ended with a presentation on WAS CE followed with the lab where they were able to see an application that runs in the application server and accesses Informix. Another decent day, now on to the last one.

Strasbourg: Day 1

I just finished the first day of class at the university of Strasbourg. Almost everything went well.

There are 20 students in the class in addition to Pierre Tellier. The class could accommodate 26 people so a total of 21 makes it look quite full. We started the day with an introduction presentation that includes, among other things, the class objectives, an agenda with tentative timing, some background on databases, and a description of the lab environment. Thiswas followed by a presentation discussion consideration on performance as it relates to hardware, operating systems, and databases. In the afternoon, we went through an introduction to IDS which led to our first lab.

After spending an hour telling them how great IDS is and how easy it is to use, the first thing I saw in the lab was that IDS would not come up! It turns out I hardcoded an IP address for the host address that worked fine on my laptop but when executed on the lab machines, the address was wrong. After struggling through finding the character positions on a French keyboard (think '|', '/', '$', etc.) I figured out the problem, provided the solution to the class and the lab continued without problems. I made sure to explain that the problem was a network address, not IDS!

We finished the day with a partial presentation on database extensibility that will continue Tuesday morning.

the students seemed to enjoy the content and the delivery of the presentations and Pierre was happy with it. I'd say that the first day was a success, two days to go. Let's see what happens...

Vive l'Alsace

My trip to the University of Strasbourg, in a region of France called Alsace, started the usual way with a trip to the airport and a plane ride of over 10 hours.

Then it got better. Pierre Tellier who coordinated the event at the University drove from Strasbourg to Frankfurt to pick me up. He did not want me to have to wait a few additional hours for a bus. When I got out of custom and he was there waiting for me. We drove around 2 hours back to Strasbourg driving at times at 160km per hour due to traffic. On his way to Strasbourg, Pierre was able to test the maximum speed of his car. It apparently clocked at 220km per hour. Of course, he had to make way for other drivers that really took advantage of the no speed limit of the German infobahn.

Picking me up in Frankfurt is extremely nice. Doing it on mother's day in France sounds like a death wish!

We got to Strasbourg and started doing some site seeing that made me feel like I was on vacation. To top it off, Pierre invited me to his house where I met his beautiful family and had dinner. What a way to start an Informix on campus event. Pierre and Strasbourg get an A-plus in hospitality. they are setting the bar very high for any other Universities in the world that will participate in the program.

the only thing I can say is vive l'Alsace, vive Strasbourg!

Informix on Campus

You may not know but the Informix lab is extending a helping hand to universities around the world. One example of that was the hosting of university professors at the last Informix conference.

As part of this, I am on my way to the university of Strasbourg (France) to teach a 3-day seminar on subjects related to IDS. I had all the latitude I wanted (and more) to decide on the content. I will be delivering this seminar starting next Monday (June 8). We'll see how it is received. Watch for my blog entries after each day, network access permitting.

Blocking SELECT

I recently met with a consultant friend of mine. He told me that he would like to have a new feature in the database server: a blocking select.

This feature would block on a SELECT until a new row is available. The SELECT statement could also have a condition (WHERE clause). If no rows are returned, the SELECT blocks until it could return at least one row. This way, an application could be event-driven without having to constantly check if there was anything new in the database. You can imagine the overhead of checking if there is something new every few seconds. A blocking SELECT could possibly reduce the pooling overhead and be more responsive depending on what the pooling interval is.

IDS does not have a blocking SELECT and as far as I know, nobody else has it either. I can think of two ways to achieve this:

• Use triggers on the table.
  This could be an INSERT and an update trigger. The trigger would test the condition and then execute a user-defined routine (UDR) to send a signal to a process that would tell the process to read the table.
  This approach could work when the table does not receive too many INSERTs and UPDATEs. The UDR could potentially find information from a file or from a configuration parameter stored in a table. It could also keep that data in memory to avoid getting the parameter for each trigger execution.
• Use the Change Data Capture API (CDC)
  CDC provides an SQL interface to the database logs. You can configure your "log snooping" for a specific table. Each time a new log record is created, the function would return. The application then needs to look at the type of record and decide what to do. This approach should be very efficient and add virtually no overhead to the database server.

Another approach would be to use the InfoSphere Change Data Capture product to replicated specific records on a message queue and have the application subscribe to these messages.

Maybe a blocking SELECT would still be a neat feature to have but with all the different ways we can provide event-driven processing, maybe it is not needed after all.

Informix = Reliability

I was talking to an Informix partner last week. They are upgrading to IDS 11.50.

A partner going to IDS 11.50...What's the big deal? I think it is when the partner is looking at upgrading from Informix SE versions as far back as version 2! And we thought we had problems convincing customers to upgrade from IDS 7.x .

Their customers are happy with what they have. It took a long time to convince them that they should move to a more current version of Informix. The customers were just happy with their current systems. Talk about reliability!

Going to IDS 11.50, they are now looking at new approaches to providing reliability in a distributed environment. With shared disk secondaries (SDS), high-availability data replication (HDR), remote secondary servers (RSS), and enterprise replication (ER), they have all the flexibility they need to provide the right solution for their customers availability requirements.

Informix reliability is often taken for granted by Informix customers. Now if the people that are not using Informix could realize the benefit they could get out of IDS 11.50, we could have a database revolution on our hands: set it, forget it, and focus on running the business, not the database system.

Why Informix

I came back from the Informix conference Thursday night and woke up thinking about an analogy about why we use Informix Dynamic Server. More on that in a minute.

I've been using databases for a long time. I believe that the first formal database system I used was back in 1984. It was a hierarchical database. I developed an inventory system for the Canadian Coast Guard. Over the following years, I used and supported multiple databases systems some looking more like C-ISAM and others relational. I still remember the good old days where I had to debug Oracle installation scripts

So, why Informix? Isn't a database a database?

I uses to use a car analogy: people buy cars and they are used to what happens to it: If they have to go to the shop to get it fixed or tunes every other month, that's just the way cars are. Who would believe that you could buy a car and only have to put gas in it for years after years without having to waste time in the shop? the car is used to get you from point A to point B day after day. It almost makes it invisible but not quite since you still have to drive it. It's not the same with a database system: it can really be invisible.

I woke up Friday with this thought: You can write just about any application in any computer language you want. Why don't we all use COBOL. Way back, I know a guy that could do EVERYTHING in COBOL. He was even doing system programming! An object oriented version of COBOL has been available for years buy why. Isn't the "vintage" version of COBOL good enough? If I'm not mistaken, the number of COBOL lines of code in production still surpass any other programming language. That should be enough of an argument to standardize on it.

It seems to me that many people apply this line of reasoning to database systems. The trend is to look at databases as commodity. Who cares that one barely requires any attention? Who cares that it provides easy continuous availability? Who cares that it has great storage optimization? The difference is only more overhead. that translates only into more costs. Those significant costs are easy to hide so why worry about them. Everybody does it so no need to be more efficient...

Well, me, I'm old school. I come from an era where memory was measured in kilobytes and disk drives in megabytes. Yes, memory is much bigger now and not that expensive. Disk drives are so much bigger and not very expensive. Computers are so fast now. It seems to me that we should stop the insanity and pay attention to efficiency. Isn't that what cloud computing, virtualization and being green is all about?

No matter how I try to slide it, to me, Informix is number 1.

Informix conference: Wednesday

This was the last day of the conference with a 35 sessions. I was surprised to see how many people attended the presentations until the end. I see this as a big endorsement of the value provided by these presentations.

On my part I delivered one presentation first thing in the morning and another one starting at 2:10 pm. Despite that, my session was well attended.

Overall a very successful conference that was well worth attending.

Informix conference: Tuesday

The day started with a keynote presentation by Dr. Anant Jhingran on "Cloud computing, databases and the role of IDS". He was assisted by our own Guy Bowerman. That was quite a good start to another great day of learning and networking.

There were 35 sessions covering subjects including Gillani Fourgen case tool, Genero report writer, IDS tasks and sensors, performance tuning, backups, trouble shooting, encryption expert, and index enhancements. Quite a range of subjects and that's not the half of it!

I had interesting conversations with some partners. One of them mentioned how the AGS Server Studio product transformed someone that knew nothing of databases into a database administrator in no time flat. Looks like the ease of use of IDS with the ease of use of AGS is an unbeatable combination. I also had a discussion about collecting and sharing the information about sensors worldwide to monitor the health of the planet. Talk about a stimulating conversation.

There is one more day of this! I don't know how much more I can take .

More on Informix warehouse

I mentioned the Informix warehouse in my previous entry. There is the chat with the lab coming up. Here's something more: a new tutorial on DeveloperWorks:

Get started with Informix Warehouse Feature, Part 1: Model your data warehouse using Design Studio

Then there are the informix Warehouse product pages:

• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/products/informix/index.html
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/products/businessintelligence/

Monday at the Informix Conference

There were 2 keynote addresses, 25 sessions, 5 bird-of-a-feather sessions, usability labs and demos in the exhibit hall. Then the day closed with an Hawaiian Luau sponsored by Gillani. A packed day to say the least.

All this was topped with the announcement of IDS 11.50.xC4 that includes a new storage optimization feature and the Informix warehouse bundle. Things are moving fast with Informix!

The storage optimization includes compression, repack the spaces that is saved and shrink the dbspace to free the space. This new feature could save 30% to 50% or even more in some cases.

The Informix warehouse bundle include a too that allows you to define your warehouse and define the process of extract, load and transform. There is a chat with the lab schedule for Wednesday, April 29th at 8:30 AM Pacific, 10:30 AM Central, 11:30 AM Eastern, 4:30 PM London, 5:30 PM Paris that will provide more information on the subject.