Have questions? Start here to find answers to commonly asked
questions related to the IBM® Informix® Dynamic Server Express, Workgroup, and Developer Editions 11.5 AMIs.
Note: Several of the statements in this document deal with the future
direction of IBM products. IBM plans are subject to change.
What are the IBM Informix Dynamic Server AMIs for Express and Workgroup Editions?
The IBM® Informix® Dynamic Server (IDS) offers different editions to help customers meet their functionality, configuration, and cost needs. IDS is a relational database suitable for deployment across a wide range of solutions and business sizes.
IDS is well known for its legendary reliability, blazing fast OLTP performance, security, and near hands free administration for high-volume OLTP applications. IDS has a wide range of capabilities for customers to ensure continuous availability and maximize their hardware investments, in addition to offering active-active clustering capabilities for easy scalability on demand. IDS is ideal for managing deployments from small to tens of thousands of instances with no or few DBAs. IDS is also a data server of choice for integrated and embedded solutions.
IDS Express Edition is a full-function IDS data server providing very attractive entry-level pricing for small and medium businesses. IDS Express Edition offers a strong foundation for building on demand solutions for high-volume online transaction processing (OLTP) and near-zero transaction response time, with high reliability, low cost of administration, and remote management of IDS servers. It is a leading choice data server for business partners integrating their solutions with IDS for small businesses, requiring minimal or no database administration.
IDS Workgroup Edition is an ideal data server for deployment in a departmental,
workgroup, or medium-size business solution. IDS Workgroup Edition offers a strong
foundation for building on demand medium-size business solutions. Building on values
from the IDS Express Edition, IDS Workgroup Edition offers customers continuous availability and remote scalable management of thousands of IDS servers. IDS offers unparalleled scalable administration, managing up to 2,000 IDS instances with just 1 DBA. IDS Workgroup Edition is a leading data server for business partners integrating their solutions for medium size businesses, requiring minimal or no database administration. With IDS’ high availability (HA) innovations, customers have a wide choice of options to deploy a continuously available solution while delivering blazing fast performance and utilizing all available hardware resources.
IDS can be easily integrated or embedded into solutions across a broad range of industries such as automotive, banking, electronics, entertainment, finance, gaming, government, health, leisure, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, distribution, and transportation.
What software is installed in the IDS Express and Workgroup Edition AMIs?
Each AMI is preconfigured with the latest version of IDS 11.50, and a host of productivity and development tools. There are separate AMI images for the IDS Express and Workgroup Editions.
The IDS Developer Edition includes all core features of the IDS Enterprise Edition. IBM offers the IDS Developer Edition for development use with some memory and usage limitations described in the license.
The continued popularity and use of IDS is illustrated by the fact that in North America alone, it is used in critical business applications by eight of the top ten US retailers and 95% of global telecommunications companies. Informix was named the #1 Vendor of 2008 in VendorRate due to input from the loyal customer base.
Customers value IDS for:
Legendary reliability, performance, and availability for mission-critical applications
"Set it and Forget it" Near hands-free administration makes IDS very easy to administer and very low cost to own. Companies with a large fleet of database servers (such as retail operations with remote stores and telecommunication devices) can manage thousands of servers with a small remote staff.
Active-Active clustering solutions in any combination with remote replicas deliver flexible business continuity that can deliver up to 99.999% availability. Design the architecture that fits the global business need.
Workload management capabilities make it easy to scale out on low cost hardware.
Security features protect data from unauthorized access and audit features help customers comply with government regulatory requirements.
Efficient use of hardware resources allows IDS customers to do more with less.
The Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) Developer Edition AMI features IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) Enterprise Edition and an assortment of development and productivity tools that are used to:
Develop new applications
Create IDS demonstrations and presentations
Develop and test IDS applications
What software is installed in the IDS Developer Edition AMI?
The AMI is preconfigured with the latest version of IDS 11.50, a fully configured
multi-node active cluster for high-availability (MACH11) environment, and a host of
productivity and development tools, including:
IBM IDS Developer Edition
IBM Informix Client SDK
IBM Informix JDBC Driver
IBM Informix Spatial DataBlade
IBM Informix Web DataBlade
IBM Data Server Driver for JDBC/SQLJ
IBM Data Server Driver for ODBC/CLI
IBM OpenAdmin Tool for IDS
IBM Data Studio Developer
IBM may decide to add other Informix offerings in the future (subject to change).
The IDS AMI is based on SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2.
What kinds of applications are appropriate for IDS?
IDS is used as the foundation for applications across all industries, and excels at high volume online transaction processing, Web 2.0, SOA, ERP, CRM and other operational database applications.
What application development languages and APIs does IDS support?
You can develop applications for IDS using all of the standard language APIs and open source environments, including: C/C++, Cobol, Java, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc.. IDS supports all of the major development interfaces including SQL-based APIs such as ODBC, OLE DB, JDBC, SQLJ, ADO.NET, Microsoft LINQ, CLI, Ruby on Rails Active Record, PHP PDO, Python etc..
The following drivers are pre-configured on the AMI: C/C++, Java, ODBC, JDBC, JCC, SQLJ, and CLI.
Use the wizard to launch the AMI you selected in the quickstart list.
You can find more details about the above steps on Amazon EC2 FAQs.
Note: You can also use the Amazon AWS Management Console to launch your instance, but you must use the command line tools to finish the launching process of the IDS virtual appliance AMI instance once the status of your instance is “running” in the Console.
Does IBM provide remote support for the IDS AMIs?
Yes. The IDS editions are currently supported through the Informix IDS forum.
Do you have a list of IBM Informix Dynamic Server customers?
There are many customers, quotes and case
studies. In addition to quotes and links on this site, you an also view case studies
at the “Success stories” link, and get links to education and certification information.
When was IBM Informix Dynamic Server 11.5 released to market?
Find this information in the announcement letter for
IBM Informix Dynamic Server 11.5 (April 28, 2008).
Are other Informix software editions available on AWS as AMIs today?
No.
What resources are available to get started with IDS?
