Fix list for Informix 11.70.xC6

As Fernando Nunes already pointed out, 11.70.xC6 was released October 23. New releases always pique my interest and the first thing I do is checkout the What's New page in the documentation. After I sift through the new features list and mentally classify them into "Yes! Finally", "Useful", "Meh" and "I'll Bet Someone Needs That, But I Don't" groups I like to take a look at the non feature additions to the release, the bug fixes.

IIUG 2013 - Going Back to Cali

IIUG 2013 - The Premier Technical Conference for Informix Fanatics - will return to beautiful Southern California and the San Diego Mission Valley Marriott April 21 - 25, 2013.

The IIUG 2013 Conference Planning Committee is currently accepting presentation abstracts until November 15, 2012. If you would like to speak at this year's conference and receive a complimentary conference pass you can submit your idea to iiug2013.org/speakers and find more information about speaking at iiug.org.

Using Data Distributions to Write Better Code

I was recently asked to go back and look at some code to see if there was a way to speed things up because over time performance had decreased to unacceptable levels. Because I'm a DBA first and a developer second, I started with the SQLs, tables and indexes to see if there was anything obvious. There wasn't, but I did find the following query being run a lot and it looked funky so I started to investigate.

select first 1
   col1
from
   tab1
where
   col1 = "A" or
   col1 = "AB" or
   col1 = "ABC" or
   col1 = "ABCD" or
   col1 = "ABCDE" or
   col1 = "ABCDEF" or
   col1 = "ABCDEFG" or
   col1 = "ABCDEFGH" or
   col1 = "ABCDEFGHI"
order by
   length(col1) desc