Informix and the Fightin' Kangaroos

Praveen Rao, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, says the word Informix at 0:58 in the following video:



This is actually pretty satisfying for me. When I was on the IIUG Board we decided it would be a good idea to offer a free 1 day conference pass for the 2010 IIUG Informix conference in Overland Park to the Computer Science professors in the area. With help from IBM we were able to get Praveen and others to come and experience the Informix technology and interact with the Informix fanatics at IIUG2010.

I'm happy to see Praveen chose to include Informix in his curriculum and take advantage of the academic materials IBM provides and hope others will too.

Here is the original article.

Innovator-C: 446 Days of Continuous Uptime in Jeopardy

This morning Hannes Visagie posted to the IIUG SIGs about a change to the Innovator-C limitations listed on the IBM Informix Innovator-C page that states Innovator-C will be limited to run on 1 core, down from the previous limitation of 4 cores. I sure hope this refers to CPUVPs and not hardware cores in the server, because who has a single core machine handy these days?

lockwt - My go to utility for finding locking problems

If you haven't already added lockwt to your arsenal of Informix DBA tools, you need to immediately.

lockwt is a free utility written by Eric Herber of the The Informix Zone, planetIDS and Herber Consulting that can be downloaded here and is infinitely helpful when you get the midnight call to find out why a table is locked and everyone is screaming.

Informix Remix

I didn't expect to find this in my Google Alerts for Informix today...

Informix Remix

For my Brazilian friends, they're coming to a club near you in July!

Advanced DataTools Fastest DBA Webcast

Don't forget to register for the Fastest Informix DBA webcast tomorrow. Lester, Art and I will be talking about how the winners achieved our results at IIUG 2012. In my case, I'm going to go with lots and lots of luck and a power surge that gave Lester's Mac Mini Server super computing strength at the precise moment I started my benchmark run.

Here is the info:

Advanced DataTools held our latest Fastest Informix DBA Contest, at the 2012 IIUG Informix Conference, April 22-25, 2012 in San Diego, California. Andrew Ford, was the Grand Prize Winner of the new Apple iPad and the Fastest Overall Informix DBA.

Andrew's results were almost three times faster than the next closest contestant's results. This year the contest was run on an Apple Mac Mini Server, using Informix Enterprise 11.70.FC4. The server is very small and inexpensive, 1.4 inches by 7.7 inches square. The CPU is an Intel Core i7 with 4 cores, and includes 8GB of RAM, and it has two disk drives, one for the application and one for the database. It is amazing to see 1,000 user sessions running on this little box and to achieve the level of throughput that Andrew accomplished. The goal of the contest was to see who could optimize an Informix database server running 1,000 OLTP users in under one hour, and generate the most transactions per minute. Andrew generated over 57,000 transactions per minute. We used the Open Source BenchmarkSQL Java program to generate the transactions for this contest. The BenchmarkSQL is a JDBC benchmark that closely resembles the TPC-C standard for OLTP. It is a Java program that generates 1,000 sessions doing inserts, updates, and deletes against the Informix database server.

Webcast: Fastest Informix DBA Contest - How did they do it?
Date: Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 at 2:00pm EST
Register: http://www.iiug.org/url/adt-fastest-dba.html
Info: http://www.advancedatatools.com/Informix/index.html