Hello, and welcome to my first blog post.  In this blog I will concentrate on topics relevant to Informix.  I'll cover new features, new releases, success stories, recent events, uses case, and general information relevant to the Informix community.

 

The first topic I'd like to cover is blogging itself.  I know that many of you that are reading this are as interested in the success of Informix as I am.  I know you have strong opinions about what Informix should be doing in terms of features, marketing, or sales.  The fact is that you all make as much of an impact on the success of Informix as IBM does.  Informix would not be as successful as it is without your support.  What I am asking is that you make your opinions public by creating a blog yourself.  Its a great way to help spread the word about Informix.  If you are not an IBM employee and have a blog then that's even better.  The point is that the more people we have spreading the word about Informix the better.

 

For recent events there are a couple I would like to mention.  I've spent quite a bit of time in China over the last couple years talking with new and existing customers, the most recent being last week.  What I have seen is that the excitement around Informix is building each year.  A good example is the China Users Group for Informix.  Two years ago there was no users group in China.  Since most people there do not feel comfortable reading and writing in English it meant that our customers had a hard time getting the same information that is easily availble on the IIUG website.  The CNIUG was established about 1 1/2 years ago and now is flourishing with 100s of people signed up.  Their forum is very active and they have done a great job sponsoring numerous events.  There is a 3 day Chinese IUG conference held each year plus many road shows and seminars.  In addition to the users group we have also opened an Informix lab in Beijing. 

 

The other event that is currently going on is the IBM sales and techincal enablement event going in Brussels.  Fred Ho and Terri Gerber are there right now getting the IBMer's up to speed on our newest features and functions.  Read Fred's blog, I believe he will talk about more about it.  (And after Fred's blog have a look at Keshava Murthy's and Jonathan Leffler's blogs as well, both newly started).

 

Talking about new features, I think most of you already know that 11.50.xc6 is out the door and .xc7 will come out shortly.  We did something a little different with 11.50 putting more features into our fixpacks.  Here's a quick list of some of the things that came out in the 11.50 fixpacks:

 

Compression

External tables (from XPS) 

Light Scan Support for all builtin datatypes (from XPS) 

Merge statement

Connect By statement

Support for online attach/detach when there is no data movement

Many Open Admin Tool Changes (compress, auto update stats, ER plugin, etc...)

Many ER enhancements (new alters, new cdr check options, etc...)

Delay applying updates on a secondary 

Backup from a secondary 

XA transaction support on secondary 

Security checks for improper symbolic links at startup 

Multibyte character enhancements

Direct IO on AIX 

Virtual appliance enhancements 

Better Cloud support 

 

This is just off the top of my head.  As you can see we have been quite busy.  All this is in addition to the features that were part of the initial 11.50 release, things like shared disk support. We are also working hard on the next release of IDS which will also be filled with a lot of new features and functions.  As we get closer to the release date I'll be sure to keep everyone up to date on what we will have.

 

Well, that's it for now!