A presentation deck that highlights the features of Informix v11.70 release. The release had made lots of noise in the area of High Availability Cluster, Performance, OLTP Characteristics, etc. Get to know more about it.

1. © 2010 IBM Corporation
What’s New in Informix
Vaibhav S Dantale – Informix Evangelist (ASIA PAC)

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Agenda
 Informix Update
– Product and Features Overview
– New Informix features in 11.70
• Grid, Warehousing, Embed ability, Applications, Security
– Call To Action

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Product & Features Overview

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IBM Informix: Foundational Principles
■ Scalability (IBM Informix multithreaded DSA –Dynamic Scalable
Architecture)
■ Extreme OLTP Performance
■ Low footprint and little hardware resources
■ High flexibility and consistency (easy to use and learn)
■ Easy to administer and maintain (low TCO)
■ Robustness and resilience (always up and running)
■ Enterprise-Class server (meets the highest quality and mission critical
demands)

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Informix v11 Key Features
Continuous Availability
Multiple Secondaries
Shared Disk Secondary
Active-Active cluster
Workload management
Flexible failover handling
Backup/Restore to Directory
Parallel Whole System Backup
Ordering of DBSpaces During
Backup/Restore
Continuous Log Restore
Non-Blocking Checkpoint
Optimistic Concurrency
Enterprise Replication
Enhancements
Admin Free Zone
Open Admin Tool
Admin API
Cluster Management
Extensive ER Support
Rename and Configuration
Changes
Automated Update Stats
Improved Wizards
Windows Installer Updated
to Installshield ISW
Application Development
Dynamic SQL in SPL
Trigger Enhancements
Named Parameters in a Callable
Statement
BIGINT and BIGSERIAL support
Derived Tables in the FROM
Clause of Queries
Index Self Join
Basic Text Search with XML
support
Enhanced Data Types for
Distributed Queries
Deployment Wizard
Optimizer Directives in ANSI-
Compliant Join Queries
Sysdbopen / Sysdbclose
XML Publishing &
Transformations
Auto Re-prepare
Security
Common Criteria (ISO/IEC
15408)
Label Based Access Control
Encrypted Communication in
HDR
Single sign-on via Kerberos
SSL Encryption
Web Feature Service

6. © 2010 IBM Corporation
Informix Features and Value
Clustering, Replication
GUI Based: Open Admin Tool (OAT)
Compression
Warehouse
Time Series and other Datablades
High Availability & Performance
Ease of Use, Hands Free
Low Cost
Business Intelligence
Smart Meters and Sensors, GIS
and other innovative solutions

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Informix: Clustering
High Performance, High Availability …
 High Performing data server:
– If your information has to be served up quickly
– It has to be always available.
– Customers scale for high volume throughput
– Financial services: 100,000 messages/sec on 4-CPU Linux
system
– Pharmacy system: 1B transactions per day on a 8-CPU
machine
– Over 225 transactions/sec on a 32-CPU system with space
for growth
 High Availability: Reduces costs
– What does downtime cost your organization?
“In our benchmarking process, Informix came out above all other
leading solutions for its performance, scalability and reliability.”
- Jon Tasker - Project Manager, Trafficmaster, UK
How much does 1 hour of
downtime cost your business?
TimeIsMoney
$6,450,000/hour is $107,500/minute!

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Add Capacity
Locally on Demand
Add Synchronize
Copies for HA and
Extra Workload
Handling Share Point of
Sales Data with
Headquarters
Share Subsets of
Information Between
Clusters of Servers
Putting it All Together
The Informix Advantage: Flexible/Scalable Architecture
Expand and Implement GloballyAnimated Slide

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Informix: Open Admin Tool
Ease of Use & Hands Free
 All of your Informix Systems can be
administered from this simple GUI Tool.
 Monitor your entire environment
 Drill down to a single site
 Drill down to a singe server
 Or look at a single SQL statement
Many customers average 2,000 servers per DBA
Manage a few or thousands of locations

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New Features in Informix 11.70

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Panther Themes
 Intelligent Grid
 Easy Embeddability
 Expand Warehouse Infrastructure
 Empower Applications Development
 Enhanced Security Management

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Intelligent Grid: Simple Setup
 Install Informix on your server(s)
– Servers may have secondary servers attached such as HDR, RSS, or SDS servers
 Define a grid to contain your servers:
– Just give your grid a name and tell it the list of servers to use
– You can either use the Open Admin Tool graphical interface or a command line tool to
define your grid
– Configure whether you want to replicate just schema changes or schema and data changes
 The grid is ready to use!
Spread your Workload Across different Hardware, Operating systems, and versions of
Informix
AIX Linux
Dynamic Global Grid
Secondary
Solaris
Secondary
Windows

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Intelligent Grid: Simple Administration
 Flexible and easy to use
– Administer all the servers in the Grid through SQL or the graphical Open Admin Tool
• Define which servers are allowed to administer the grid
• Attach to that server and administer all servers in your grid
– Comprehensive set of administration commands
• Dynamically add and drop servers to/from the grid
• Performing all DDL operations on all servers in the grid, such as Create Table, Alter
Table, …
• Interface for targeting administration to a subset of servers in the grid
Allows running a query simultaneously on one or more servers in the grid
Output of the query is kept in a local table on each server for later inspection
This interface can be used as a general purpose distributed query executor as well:
» For instance look at the inventory of each store to see what items need to be
reordered
– It is still possible to administer individual servers in the Grid directly
• Through OAT or command line tools

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Intelligent Grid: Simple Workload Management
 Setup a connection manager for the grid
– A simple configuration file determines what servers to manage
– The connection managers for different sets of servers can be run simultaneously
– Several identical connection managers can be run simultaneously for higher availability
 The connection manager for grid distributes application connection requests to the servers in the grid
 Example:
 Assume a grid with a server in New York and a server in San
Francisco
 The connection manager for grid can be setup for users on both
coasts:
 Use it to connect users in SF to the server in SF and the users
in NY to the NY server
 If a server goes down the connection manager for grid will reroute
connections to the remaining server
 For instance SF users would start connecting to the NY server
 If a server goes down that has a backup secondary server then
connections will be rerouted to the backup server once failover is
complete
Connection
Manager for grid

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Usage Example: Expanding Beyond a Single Cluster
An Informix
Cluster running
on AIX
Shared
Disk
Tables: A, B, C, D
An Informix
Cluster running
on Linux
Shared
Disk
Tables: A, B, E, F
Connection Manager
for grid
Connection Manager
for Cluster
Connection Manager
for Cluster
Initially one cluster
is needed
Business grows
and a new cluster
in a new city is
needed – new
hardware is used
New applications
are created that
require data from
both sites so a grid
is created
Dynamic Global Grid

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Embeddability
 Self Maintenance
– Automated storage allocation
• Allow existing chunks to be extended automatically
• Add chunks automatically when space is low
• Threshold used to determine when to add space
 Self Configuring
– Deployment Assistant / Utility
• Build a package containing
Informix
(Optional) pre-built database(s)
(Optional) applications
• Compresses the package
• Deploy, decompress, and install the package on multiple systems
• Good for media distribution such as CDs
 Informix Embeddability toolkit
– Tutorial for creating an end to end embeddability scenario
– Example scripts for using Deployment Assistant/Utility

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Embeddability
 Self Healing:
– Standardize errors and alarm codes for application exception handling
• Out of memory, out of disk, root uninitialized, assertion failure, IDS not
running, etc…
– Basic Text Search, Web Feature Service, Node, Spatial, Timeseries, MQ
• Can now be used without first registering them in your database
– Internally handle errors and retry when possible
• For example, automatically adding space to a table, automatically
registering blades…
– Automated DB Scheduler tasks added
• Timeout users that have been idle for too long
• Automatic notification when IDS marks an index “bad”
• Automatic table storage optimization based on user settable
parameters
• Automatically allocate CPU VPs to match hardware/licensing when
IDS starts

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Warehouse Infrastructure
 Query optimization
– Improved Star and Snowflake join performance
– Support for using more than one btree index in a query
– Optimal memory management for warehouse queries
 Improved statistics handling
– Fragment level statistics are saved
– Fragment statistics are combined to form global table statistics
– Will not rebuild statistics for fragments that haven’t changed
– Attach/detach will automatically update statistics when applicable
 As tables grow automatically add table fragments based on intervals
– Intervals can be date intervals (e.g. 1 month) or numeric intervals
(e.g. 1-100)
 “list” fragmentation
 Will create a fragment for each item in a list, for example:
… PARTITION p1 VALUES ('CA', 'OR') IN dbs1

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Enhanced Application Development
 Stored Procedure Debugging
– Integration with the Optim Data Studio procedure debugger
– Integration with Microsoft Visual Studio debugger
 Improved compatibility with open source applications:
– Drupal, Hibernate, Geronimo, iBATIS, Mediawiki, Tomcat, Xwiki
– Possible enhancements for:
• Alfresco, Atlasian, Bugzilla, JBoss, Joomla, Mono, OpenBravo,
SugarCRM, etc…
 New SQL syntax added for compatibility
– As open source applications are ported syntax changes are made to
accommodate those programs:
• NULL clause now supported
• Relax the position of the default clause
• Relax the position of ON DELETE CASCADE
• Support for “if [not] exists”
• Expressions allowed as arguments to “count” aggregate

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Enhanced Application Development - Features
 Table defragmentation (online table reorg)
– Coalesce contiguous extents to reduce number of extents
 Provide support for MQ series server on a remote box
– Multiple instances of IDS to attach to the same MQ server
– Expose the messages in the queue as an IDS table
 New install framework
– Consistent UI across all platforms
 More language supported by OAT
 Optim Performance Manager support for IDS

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Enhanced Security – Features
 Selective row-level (SRL) Auditing
– Allow customers to pick which tables and operations to audit
 Trusted Context
– Trust user authentication done by middle tier applications
– Allow these middle tier applications to switch users over an existing
connection without shutting down the connection
 Support non-OS users
– IDS users will no longer need to have a login on the host OS
 Encryption of raw disks via Encryption Expert
– Encryption for regular file systems already supported
– Vormetrics currently supports only HP, but more available shortly
– Most Informix customers use raw disks

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Call to Action
 “Got old versions?” Get a quote for a Bridge to Upgrade
 Visit the “Discover Informix” site and
Download the Informix e-book
Check out the online Informix ROI tool
 Join the IIUG www.iiug.org & http://informixindia.in – Watch for Informix events in your area
 Save operational costs by Upgrading to Informix 11.7
 Contact IBM with Questions / Feedback
 WATCH THIS SPACE http://www.ibm.com/discoverinformix

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Additional Resources on Informix Product Features
• IBM.com/informix Official page
• http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/informix/
• (IBM Internal) Informix Competitive wiki – Informix Topics
• http://w3.ibm.com/connections/wikis/home?lang=en#/wiki/DM%20Competitive%
20Wiki/page/Informix%20Topics
• (IBM Internal) Discover Informix
• http://w3-103.ibm.com/software/xl/portal/content?synKey=J307050C03147H20
• (IBM Internal) Informix Set it and Forget it
• http://w3-
103.ibm.com/software/xl/portal/content?synKey=I552869E51163U58#overview

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Questions