IDS 7.31 went EOS today. The king is dead, long live the king.

Text search webcast.

Call for presentations for IIUG 2010.

Make space in your diary for the UK community event.

Since IDS Version 10.00 dbspaces can be created with other than the default 2k/4k pagesize.

This feature has multiple benefits:

• less disk I/O with larger pagesizes (8k ... 16k)
• more rows per data/index page (max. 255 Rows / data page)
• higher upper limit of rows per table (max. 16777216 pages / table fragment)
• higher upper limit of table/index extents
• reduce "-136 ISAM error: no more extents." Errors

Example (stores_demo database):

Today, Informix-Dynamic Server 7.31 finally goes EOS (End of Support, or retirement for the non-techies among you.) The first GA release of 7.31 was UC2, officially released on 26 February 1999. More than ten years and seven months later, and to the accompaniment the wailing and gnashing of teeth of thousands of users, this version has finally ceased to be supported.

I am sure you have had your fair share of onbar backup and restore issues. We have a new Backup and Restore analyzing data document (Thanks to Grant Flander) that will help you with your analysis. Please review the document and provide your feedback ! 

Last Wednesday, Terri and I went from Brussels to Roosendaal (Netherland) to visit our Informix partner Informa. The first thing we saw when we arrived at their building was a 4 feet tall informix logo sign, the original blue logo.

We had a great meeting talking about the Informix roadmap and the state of the Informix business as they see it at Informa. Bertino and Rob also told us that they found two Informix customers that did not know that IBM had bought Informix!

It could be a problem for the application (or the admin) when database tables next extent size
is larger than the dbspace free size. Here is a example function/task for the IDS 11.X sysadmin database to
check these events:

• Date: Thursday, Oct the 15th
• Time: 1 hour -- 8:30 AM PST, 10:30 AM Central, 11:30 AM Eeastern, 4:30 PM London, 5:30 PM Paris, 5:30 PM Berlin
• Title: Advanced Text Searching Topics in IDS
• Speaker: Mark Ashworth

You can register for t

Although the IIUG site is quiet about this, an email note was sent to IIUG members advertising this year's vNext survey.

The survey tries to poll user's opinions about new features that we would like to see in future Informix versions. The results will be (and I quote) "passed on to the powers that be". Meaning the R&D team will take them into consideration while planning for future versions.

Some of the features proposed are very interesting, but if you have some ideas not mentioned in the survey you can add your own.

Are you a faculty member or a student? Imagine learning Informix being just as easy as opening a box.

Are you an Informix advocate that wants to help more students learn about Informix?

There's a Cloud Computing for Developers virtual workshop taking place on October 1. Hosted by technical evangelists at Amazon Web Services and IBM it will cover topics such what you need to know start writing cloud applications and some of the benefits, as well as the IBM solutions available.

Check here for more details and to sign up:  http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01005c/isv/iic/events/description.jsp?event=4337D2D62C6B27C78625761F0054D275