The Informix Zone - download

Free IDS Developer Version - A nightmare for other data servers ?

eherber — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:36:50 +0200

Free IDS Developer Version - A nightmare for other data servers ?

Update 2007-11-07 - Ready for Download

As Fernando Nunes announced in his blog, the new IDS Developer Edition is now available. You can download it from the following URL:

http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/search.jsp?go=y&rs=ifxids

We've been waiting for it a long long time, but now a Free IDS Developer Version will soon be downloadable from the following website:

New IBM website: IDS Developer Edition

According to information from IBM the download is planned to be available next week at Oct 31th. The Halloween night is a perfect release date for the free IDS Developer Edition. Developers have now direct access to IBM's most powerful data server that provides superior extensibility combined with incredible scalability as a highly optimized cluster database. I guess the release date will be a nightmare for some other data servers because developers can now test and decide which engine is actually the best one to serve their applications. No doubt that IDS will make the race !!

This also shows that IBM has responded to the demand of the market. Visitors of The Informix Zone have clearly articulated in a past poll that a free IDS version is mandatory:

The free IDS version is only for development purposes and not for deployment in production environments. There are some limitations in this free IDS version:

1 CPU VP
1 GB of memory
8 GB total disk space
20 concurrent connections

However the good thing is that all features are included. That means that the full MACH 11 cluster replication technology is available as well as the powerful datablade extensibility technology. And the free edition will be available on a broad range of platforms including:

IBM AIX® Power PC® 64-bit
Hewlett-Packard HP-UX PA-RISC 64-bit
Hewlett-Packard HP-UX Itanium® 64-bit
Linux® Intel® 32-bit
Linux Intel AMD 64-bit
Sun Solaris SPARC 64-bit
Sun Solaris AMD64/Opteron
Windows® 2003 32-bit and 64-bit
Windows XP 32-bit and 64-bit
Windows Vista (except Home Edition) 32-bit and 64-bit

There is also a MAC port of IDS currently under development at IBM. So the list of platforms for the free IDS Developer Edition will be further enhanced. That gives developers the freedom of choice they need. Most other offerings are limited to the Windows and Linux platforms. IDS leaves it to the Application Developer which platform they prefer.

There is also a new IBM website online now that covers a broad range of themes regarding application development with IDS:

New IBM website: Informix Application Development

For your convenience I've include the links to the two new IBM websites (IDS Developer Edition and IDS Application Development) as primary links at the top of The Informix Zone website above the search box.

Download, install and test the free IDS Developer Edition and build your own opinion which data server is optimal suited for you application. You will be suprised !!

The Informix Zone will inform you as soon as the free IDS Developer Edition is ready for download.

IDS Survey by oninit and openpsl

eherber — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 17:14:37 +0100

IDS at its best

The UK based companies oninit and openpsl recently published the results of an Informix Uptime Survey. There were about 241 companies attending the survey.

The Survey Objectives

Demonstrating that IDS is a strategic data server that provides:

Scalability - superior OLTP performance
Reliability - minimal downtime
Administrability - Hands free administration

The Survey Results

The results of the survey are impressive. They confirm the superior scalability and legendary reliability of IBM's secret weapon. But even more impressive are the extremly low administration costs for managing IDS. There is no other data server around that outperforms IDS in terms of Scalability, Reliability and Administrability.

Comments from Customers

Here are some comments of customers who participated in the survey regarding IDS:

Can't remember ever having an IDS related outage
The databaseserver has never been down except for server OS upgrades
Can't remember the last outage...over 5 years ago
The databaseserver has never been down except for server OS upgrades
IDS has proven to be a superb product
Easy to work with - runs like a champ
Extremly reliable system
IDS is 'set it and forget it'
I've clients who have over 500 days of uptime
Great database. Best one we have and we have Oracle and DB2
IDS rocks for heavy OLTP performance compared to SQL Server and DB2

These are real statements from real customers, not promises written down on powerpoint slides, not claims from advertising campaigns or a sponsored study about the TCO of a database systems. It is real life !!

Most of those customers already made their experiences with the claims and promises of Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server. Real Life disproves false promises and the customers appreciate once again the unique capabilities of IDS which is the only database that delivers a real business advantage.

The Complete Survey

Please read the complete results of the survey and the impressive real life statements from customers about the oustanding Scalability, Reliability and Administrability of IDS:

Informix Uptime Survey

A special thanks goes to John Baker of oninit who allowed me to publish the survey result on The Informix Zone.

Update 2008-10-22

A recent survey from VendorRate confirmed that INFORMIX has the highest customer satisfaction:

Customer Satisfaction: Informix far ahead of Oracle, Apple, Microsoft...

Summary for Webcast "Cheetah Roadmap"

eherber — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:31:09 +0100

IBM's shift towards IDS

The Cheetah - Introduction and Roadmap webcast has been held by the Director of the Informix Lab Jerry Keesee. Jerry's presentation didn't dive deeply into the details of the Cheetah Release but it delivered an interesting overview about certain Cheetah features and the ongoing impressive progress of Informix@IBM.

The Presentation

Cheetah - Introduction and Roadmap

The Roadmap Picture

The Highlights

IBM deciced to rely on IDS as foundation of a new, exiting product called Websphere RFID Information Center. It is IBM's major initiative into the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) space and is planned to be released this month. The outstanding replication capabilities, industry leading extensibility features and the extremly low administration costs of IDS have been the crucial factors for this groundbreaking decision.
A new IBM Redbook has been published and provides an excellent overview about the superior IDS technology.
Feedback from customers participating in the closed beta program for Cheetah is extremly positive. An open beta called TEST DRIVE is planned to start in February 2007. This allows anybody to download Cheetah and test the exiting new features of this release.
A great marketing campaign around Cheetah is planned for 2007, comparable to the launch of the latest DB2 release (Codename Viper).
Two real life examples covering the unique capabilites of IDS technology have been mentioned:
- A Retailer company runs 10.000 IDS instances with 8 DBA's and an uptime of 99.999 percent - IMPRESSIVE !!
- A Wall Street company receives stock quotes from every market in the world, 24 hours a day, more than 100.000 messages per second, storing 5 Terabyte of data on a 4 CPU Linux box. IDS technologies involved are the Real Time Datablade and the Timeseries Datablade - IMPRESSIVE !!
There is definitely no other data server that provides a comparable efficient administration, reliability and performance paired with an extremly hardware gentle architecture. IDS is the most efficient data server, no doubt about that !!
Cheetah will deliver new functionality in the areas of Security, XML, Web Services, Administration and Oracle Compatibility. More details can be found in Jerry's presentation. There is even more, groundbreaking functionality in Cheetah which will be announced later.
A major focus of Cheetah is to deliver superior support for Application Developers. New and enhanced drivers for the .NET (the Open Beta for CSDK 3.00 just started) and the JAVA platform as well as for the popular script languages like Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby will be released. EGL (Enterprise Generartion Language), a new Developer Work Bench and the Rational Data Architect will also offer superior support for IDS.
IDS is the optimal solution for highly critical 24x7 OLTP systems. UK based consultancy company oninit published the results of a recent survey among INFORMIX customers regarding IDS performance, reliability and administrability. The results are really impressive and I will cover them separately in an upcoming article.

Conclusion

IBM's shift towards IDS becomes more and more apparent. The excellent growth rate in IDS new license sales leaves no doubt about the strong future of INFORMIX. IDS is not hidden anymore, it is IBM's database of choice for several emerging markets and important application areas.

IDS is the uncrowned star of IBM's Information Management Division and establishes itself once again as the only real alternative to old bull Oracle.

The Committed Concurrency feature of the upcoming Cheetah Release will further outpace stepbrother DB2 in the favor of software vendors migrating their applications away from Oracle to an IBM data server.

The cult database IDS is IBM's Secret Weapon in a highly competitive database market.

IDS is not a commodity - it provides a real advantage over the competiton !!

IDS 10 - Free Download from the IIUG

eherber — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 13:20:01 +0200

IBM/IIUG offer

You might already heard about it. The IIUG (International Informix User Group) does now offer the download of an IDS 10 version without time bomb. It is for non-commercial use only and has a hard limit of five concurrent user sessions.

Platform Support

The free version is based on the latest IDS release 10.00.[UF]C5 and it is available for the following platforms:

64-Bit
- AIX
- HP
- SOLARIS
32-Bit
- LINUX
- WINDOWS

IIUG Membership

There is no registration necessary, however you need to be an IIUG member in order to download the software. Membership in the IIUG is free of charge, so become a part of the worldwide Informix user community:

Join the IIUG here

After login as an IIUG member, you will find the free IDS 10 download under the Software Downloads button and in the next screen click the IDS-10 button.
If you are already an IIUG member, you must have updated your IIUG profile after 2006-07-01 in order to download the software. Updating your profile could be done by clicking the Profile button in the first screen after the login.
A redesign of the IIUG website would be desirable -:)

Test Installation

I downloaded the free IDS version (the tar-file is approx. 136 MB) and installed it on my SUSE powered notebook. After installation the software takes approx. 214 MB of diskspace which is a really small footprint compared with DB2 or Oracle -:)

Couldn't find any feature restrictions until yet. The important Informix features like ER, HDR, HPL and Fragmentation seem to be all included.

After having already five user connections opened to my test IDS instance, the next attempt to connect threw error 25571:

-25571 Cannot create a user thread.

The message log (onstat -m) contained this message:

22:35:37 You already have 5 connections at this time. Any further attempts will be rejected by IDS DEMO Server.

Useful Resources

Don't hesitate to download the free IDS version and get familiar with the outstanding Informix technology. The following IBM developerWorks article is a good start if you work on the Linux platform:

IDS and Linux -- Up and running

You should also bookmark the IDS 10 online documentation:

IDS 10 Information Center