Happy Birthday Informix - 10 years with IBM!

kbrown's picture
Submitted by kbrown on July 1, 2011 - 19:01
Today, July 1st 2011, is the 10 year anniversary of Informix being acquired by IBM.  I thought I would write a little bit about what we have accomplished over the last 10 years.  I think the list is quite impressive
 
First, we have had quite a few releases:
 
9.3 (Rocky) in 2001 
9.4 (Patriot) in 2003
10.0 (Tuxedo) in 2005
11.1 (Cheetah) in 2007 
11.5 ( Cheetah 2) 2009
11.7 (Panther) 2011
 
Each of these is represents a major effort and significant new functionality.   In addition to these major releases we had many features released in fixpacks as well.  Here is a list of some of the main features from each of these releases:
 
 Rocky:
Updateable table statistics 
Improved logging algorithsm 
Customer control over query plans 
Patriot:
Max DB size increased from 4TB to 128 Petabytes
•Increased availability with ER and HDR
•Increased replication performance
 Tuxedo: 
•Query performance improvement
•Online index build
•Multiple page size support for better space utilization
•Enhanced buffer management
•Increased security with column encryption
•Disaster recovery with table level restore

Cheetah:

•Multi-node active cluster for high-availability (MACH) 11 with multiple remote servers and shared disk cluster
•Open source tool for administration (OAT), SQL Admin API to embed admin tasks
•Improved checkpoint performance
•Secured data encryption, LBAC, Common Criteria certification
•Enhanced application development for SOA and XML
•Web Feature Service support for geospatial applications
 Cheetah 2: 

•Read/write secondary servers


•Dynamic cluster scale-out on demand
•Simple to setup cluster with application transparency
•Integrated enterprise data management with IBM Data Studio
•Macintosh client and server
•4GL support for multi-byte locale and Web Services
•Leverage Compression and use less storage
Panther: 
•Grid Computing
•Enhanced Warehouse capabilities
•Star/snowflake join
•IWA support
Support for ODS environments
•Improved optimizer statistics
•Improved application development environment
Stored procedure debugging
•Deeper Embed
•Automatic storage provisioning
•Automatic Fragmentation
•Embedability toolkit
•Installation API
•Even simpler administration
•Security
•Fine-grained Auditing
•Trusted context
•4GL Enhancements 
•Informix Genero
•Informix Warehouse Accelerator
•Flexible Availability enhacements
•TimeSeries  Enhancements
 
Moving forward the future is bright.  We have a lot of innovation in the pipeline scheduled for the next 10 years and beyond.  With our recent successes in new markets such as Energy and Utilities and embeded/Mobile Devices we are not only concentrating on existing customers but on expanding our business to customers that have not traditionally used Informix.  IBM is making this possible through collaboration with other industry teams as well as IBM research centers.
 
I look forward to another 10 years of  innovation and growth!