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Bitemporal Data - Is this the next big thing?

Submitted by akagel on March 15, 2012 - 19:52
I know you.  You are all thinking "What the heck is that?  What's Art babbling about now?" The concept of bitemporal data deals with the temporal state of our data from two separate perspectives.  Hang in there, I've got to spew the buzz words before I can explain them.  Here is what that all means.  
 
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It seems that

Submitted by akagel on February 8, 2012 - 15:20

It seems that my friends at Oninit UK have worked with i2Global to port the excellent open source CRM SugarCRM to use Informix as its repository.  It will be no surprise to us that with Informix standing behind it, SugarCRM now scales much better than it did with its default repository RDBMS.  Duh!

When is IBM going to get it that they have the best database without peer in Informix and finally get 100% behind it? 

 
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Solution to a problem

Submitted by akagel on December 14, 2011 - 16:58

I received an email this morning with a link to a Linked-In post that pointed to someone's BLOG.  The Blogger was proposing a solution to a problem someone had presented to him at work that he thought was rather elegant and so posted it for the consumption and edification of the Linked-In community.  The problem:  In a single SQL statement register an attendee for an event unless the attendee is already registered for an overlapping event.  The solution was, to me, overly complex and absolutely non-portable in that it takes advantage of Oracle's conditional INSERT statement, so I said to mysel

 
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The best database for every purpose!

Submitted by akagel on August 9, 2011 - 19:07

As a consultant I often am asked "What is the best database for everything we do?" Unfortunately, there is no easy answer for that, and I know this is not the response you all expect from me. Bear with me on this and I will explain.

 
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IBM Finally Wakes Up

Submitted by akagel on June 30, 2011 - 20:01

It looks like IBM took my test and passed! On June 8, 2011, IBM in cooperation with SmartGRIDNews.com, ran a webinar presentation to over 450 Energy Industry executives and technologists. The main thrust of the presentation was avoiding the pitfalls of implementing Smart Meter systems, however, more than 50% of the time was spent explaining how Informix is the only product that can handle the volume of data that smart data produces. (See: http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Video-Webinars/).

 
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Dumb and Dumber

Submitted by akagel on June 19, 2011 - 14:45

This is a quiz. Just like the SATs/GREs/ACTs, first we have the story, then the questions to see if you are paying attention:

 
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AUS -versus- dostats

Submitted by akagel on May 6, 2011 - 02:42

Do you like the idea of using the task manager to take care of update statistics tasks but prefer to use dostats than AUS (Auto Update Statistics) in 11.xx?  No problem, for several releases dostats_ng.ec has supported creating an AUS-like refresh function.

For a while now I have noticed that clients that are trying to use AUS to manage their statistics on larger databases are experiencing problems with the system catalogs and some tables having data distributions that are out-of-date or insufficiently detailed.  Many are going back to using dostats with our help.

 
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My next new feature request

Submitted by akagel on October 26, 2010 - 14:46

I've thought of my next feature request.  Speaking with other users, especially those in high volume near 24x7 environments, I often hear the lament that after a server restart it can take many minutes and often hours before the server reaches its normal steady state with active rows in the cache and all data dictionary entries, data distributions, stored procedures, common statements, and other cached objects loaded up.  During this ramp-up period performance is significantly reduced since most queries require a physical IO to read in the pages that are needed and possibly fill in other cache

 
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Fear the Panther

Submitted by akagel on October 19, 2010 - 03:54

So, after much waiting and absolutely no pre-event hoopla, Panther is finally here.  You will see much in the press and in the IBM official announcements about the features of Panther (Informix Dynamic Server version 11.70) that IBM thinks are important to the market place. Jerry Keesee is calling Panther "The Last of the Big Cats" hinting that IBM will be finding another theme for the next release.

 
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New Journaled Filesystem Rant

Submitted by akagel on July 28, 2010 - 14:10

There have been questions from multiple posters on the Informix Forums lately asking about Journaled File Systems (JFSes) like EXT3, EXT4, and ZFS among others.  Bottom line?  JFSes should NEVER be used for storing data for a database system.  ANY database system, whether it is Berkley DB, Oracle, Sybase, DB2, MySQL, PostGreSQL, MS SQL Server, Informix, whatever.  "But", you protest, "the journaling makes the filesystem safer.  It speeds recovery.  It is 'good thing'!"  No.  Not for databases.  Flat out - no!