The first half of this year has been an exciting time. The new Informix Data Warehouse functionality was announced by IBM, a new release of Informix was announced, and the International Informix User Group Informix Conference was held in Kansas City, April 26 to 29. I am sure others have reported on the conference details so I will focus on the contest we held to honor the Fastest Informix DBA. And I will share with you some of my findings with IBM Informix Warehouse and data compression in the IBM Informix Dynamic Server 11.50.UC4 release. Informix Warehouse 11.50, Informix 11.50.UC4 release with data compression, and an exciting user conference

Informix

Fastest Informix DBA contest My company, Advanced DataTools, sponsored a contest to find the Fastest Informix DBA. I took a simple customer billing process, added some bad SQL, and added a default ONCONFIG file with a couple of bad configuration options. The benchmark unchanged took about 30 minutes to run and I challenged participants to make it run faster. I knew this was going to be fun because when I tried this out on my staff the week before the conference, they could not stop running the benchmark. It became an exciting game to make it all go faster–even I got hooked into finding different ways to get it to run faster! We gave each participant about 45 minutes to:

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The grand prize was an Apple iPod touch or the Fastest User DBA, who had to be a paid attendee at the conference (or conference speaker or volunteer, at the discretion of the judges), not a consultant, not an IBM employee, and employed by a company using Informix internally. We also had 10 categories for many other winners (see sidebar, “Fastest Informix DBA 2009 Winners”).

Congratulations to everyone who partici-ated—this was a blast and I think everyone had fun and did a great job. They all took an ONCONFIG file and SQL script and tuned it so that it would run in less than four minutes. We are planning to do a podcast or webcast with the winners to find out how they did it. I will also use the analysis from how the winners did it as material for future articles in this magazine. And we are looking at ways to do this again, so stay tuned!

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Informix Data Warehouse function release

I have been building data warehouses using Informix for over 12 years, as it is lighting-fast for loads and queries. I have built terabyte-sized systems with thousands of users, and it works great. In April, IBM announced the Informix Data Warehouse Feature and Informix Warehouse V11.50. I was in the beta program for this function and I am really excited about the new features.

The key feature is the SQL Warehouse SQW) Design Studio, which allows you to build data connections to source and target databases, reverse engineer the source

Lester Knutsen
( lester@advancedatatools.com)
is president of Advanced
Data Tools Corporation, an IBM
Informix consulting and training
partner specializing in data
warehouse development,
database design, performance
tuning, and Informix training
and support. He is president
of the Washington, D.C. Area
Informix User Group, a
founding member of IIUG, an
IBM Gold Consultant, and an
IBM Data Champion.