IBM has updated the IDS System Requirements Webpage which now covers the latst IDS fixpa(c)k IDS 11.50.xC6.

As you probably know, IDS offers a superior high availability and scale out technology called MACH11 that is available on all platforms that IDS runs on. For that reason I consider IDS as IBM's flagship offering for Linux powered systems. Good news for all Linux fans:

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Für alle, die sich für Ubuntu Linux interessieren:

Im Nachgang zur Verfügbarkeit der IDS Ubuntu-Pakete, nachfolgend noch eine erstklassige Webseite, die sowohl die Installation von IDS als auch des Open Admin Tool auf Ubuntu 8.04 und 9.10 näher erläutert:

• Informix auf Ubuntu Linux

After running Suse Linux on my notebook for several years now, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.

Start Developing with the Linux/IDS Virtual Appliance

Amazing news for developers ! The IBM/Informix team has created a virtual appliance based on VMWare and Suse Linux. The appliance allows developers to get familiar with INFORMIX technology and immediately start the development of applications that work with this superior IBM data server.

You can find more detailed information about the IDS Virtual Appliance at Guy's Blog:

Motivated by article on using Xen and Informix on Developerworks (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0807fuerderer/index.html) and by Eric's comment I'll try to give a similar step-by-step explanation on how to setup KVM virtual machines on Linux box if you need a playground to test new features or proof-of-concept projects. Originally, I commented it seems easier to setup KVM than Xen, and hopefully I'll show it is. Except maybe for one bit :) And that's networking. More on that later. I'm assuming the next hardware configuration:

IDS 11 scales perfectly on Linux

In a recent benchmark testing Informix Dynamic Server proved it's superb scalability once again. The test has been performed with IDS 11.10 running on Suse Linux Enterprise Server 64-Bit powered by an IBM System z model.

IDS 11.10 showed 20% better performance compared to IDS 9.40. Beside the performance advantage, IDS 11.10 demonstrated near linear scalability by being able to deploy 15.3 of total 16 CPU's productively. A great result that once again demonstrates the superiority of IBM's OLTP flagship data server and it's core multithreading technology.

New: IDS Resource Agent for Linux-HA Clustering

In order to extend the High-Availability (HA) portfolio of IDS, Lars Daniel Forseth, a student of Applied Computer Science at IBM Germany, implemented the IDS Resource Agent for the Open Source Cluster software Linux-HA (aka Heartbeat, http://www.linux-ha.org) in the scope of his diploma thesis.

This IDS Resource Agent enables an HA cluster running on Linux-HA to manage an IDS database server instance as a cluster resource.

Building an unbeatable Performance Appliance

I'm proud to announce an excellent article written by my old friend and Informix fellow Christian Winterhager exclusively for The Informix Zone. Christian has a quiet long history working with Informix, actually he taught me Informix. He programs, teaches and is doing consultancy for Informix products since the middle of the 80's. That's about 20 years now, Informix must be a cult database, no doubt about that.

In his article Christian describes the creation and management of raw devices on Suse Linux.

• Three steps to create a logical volume

• From Logical Volume to Raw device

• A Python-Program for creating dbspaces und raw-devices

Three steps to create a logical volume

How can we make raw devices in Suse Linux? Is there an easy way to build chunks based on raw devices with something like a Logical Volume manager?
The answer is: yes. In this article we learn the basics of LVM2 (created by Heinz Mauelshagen) and how to use it to create raw devices for an informix instance. We will not go through the whole set of LVM-commands but only those which are necessary for handling raw devices.