Sharded Collections

Sharding allows you to seamlessly distribute rows of a table over multiple instances while keeping this implementation detail hidden from the client.

This can be an extremely powerful tool that allows you distribute your work load over many smaller/cheaper instances, achieve greater parallelism for queries and scale up your environment as you grow.

When people think of sharding, they typically think of MongoDB and the sharding of JSON documents over multiple nodes, which Informix can also do, but Informix can also shard a relational table over multiple nodes and that seems like a fun exercise. Let's try it!

Encrypted Database Connections to HCL Informix on AWS

In my last post we launched an HCL Informix AWS instance and verified the engine was running, now I want to connect to this instance from my data center over the public internet.

I can't just send data back and forth without encrypting it because I don't want my data intercepted by someone in between. I'll enable TLS encryption to keep my data secret and I'll also create a transaction table, insert some data and do some basic performance testing. In later posts, I will shard this transaction table over multiple AWS Informix instances and I'll do a little prep work to make that step easier.

If you don't plan to connect to your Informix instance over the public internet and keep all of your communications between servers in the same VPC then this encryption step is unnecessary, but it is still good to know how to do it.

Getting Started with HCL Informix on AWS

It's Saturday night and I've got a few cold ones in the fridge so let's do this. Let's get an HCL Informix instance up and running on AWS.

Prerequisites:

• You have an AWS account (sign up)
• Your OS is some flavor of Unix/Linux (not really that important)

What are we going to do?

• Create an AWS Elastic IP address
• Create an AWS Security Group
• Create a ssh key pair
• Configure and launch an EC2 instance running HCL Informix
• Connect to our EC2 instance and verify the engine is up and running

Hello Blogger, My Old Friend...

...it's time for me to write something on you again.

I haven't been writing here because I only want to write when I have something new and interesting to say and...well...I haven't had anything new or interesting to write about Informix because at this point my engines just behave themselves and run and run and run and run so I've been off in development land doing things with Python, some Javascript and a little bit of NoSQL (calm down).

That all changed with the return of the Chat with the Labs last week where Nick Geib from HCL spend a good hour and a half showing us the new HCL Informix on Amazon Web Servics (AWS) offering and my interest was piqued.