Replay Informix TechTalk: Enhancing Informix 4GL with TERMCAP Settings by Lester Knutsen
Informix TechTalk Replay: Introduction to Informix Performance Tuning by Lester Knutsen
Tech Talk on Thursday, March 10, 2022
Description: Lester Knutsen will present his top 10 Informix Database Servers performance tuning tips. The Webcast is a free introduction to Informix performance from the first lecture of his Advanced Informix Performance Tuning Course. Lester Knutsen is IBM Informix Lifetime Champion, with over 40 years of Informix experience.
Informix Tech Talks Replay: Informix Benchmarks on Cloud Systems – Updated! by Lester Knutsen
This is a replay of the Informix Tech Talk on December 9, 2021.
Description: This is an update to the presentation at the Informix 2021 Virtual Conference.
– What is the Cloud?
– Other Benchmarks, and Tools I Used
– Case Study – Supporting Informix customers on the Cloud
– Observations About Informix in the Cloud
– Updated Benchmark Results
– Updated Cost Benefit Review and Learnings
– Updated Performance Tuning Recommendations on the Cloud
Migrating and Upgrading to Informix 14 in-house or in the cloud. The easy and the hard way. by Lester Knutsen. There are several easy procedures to upgrade and migrate Informix. We will look at the easy way (in-place upgrades, dbexport, cdr migrate, backup/restore), but sometimes they may not work for you, and you need to create a custom process. We will go over a set of procedures and scripts using HPL, external tables, and parallel unloads/loads that I have used over the last few years to migrate from small systems up through terabyte-sized databases to VMs, new hardware, and the cloud.
Informix by default uses the Operating System (OS) to manage users. In this video, Lester Knutsen will demonstrate how to create a Non-OS Informix User that can access Informix databases without having an OS login.
This is the first in a series of videos on Informix TechTalks by the IIUG. For more information on the International Informix Users Group (IIUG) please visit https://www.iiug.org
How do you use the command-line utilities to manage and monitor an Informix Server? We will discuss onstat, oncheck, and the new InformixHQ to manage your server.
How do you build databases and tables in Informix? We will discuss best practices for creating and managing databases and tables, partitioning, and database security. We will demonstrate object-oriented data types, using SQL to generate SQL Scripts and creating a Non-OS user for Informix database security.
How do you connect users and tools to an Informix Server from Windows, Unix, and the Web? We will discuss connections using Microsoft ODBC, Informix SDK, Java, PHP, DRDA, and other options. This is a Webcast reply from June 25, 2020.
How do you backup and restore an Informix Server? High Availability is crucial to a successful database. We will cover and demonstrate database backups, restores, and setting up High Availability Data Replication (HDR). This replay includes additional material on HDR setup and switching between Primary and Secondary Servers that is not covered in the original webcast.
How do you configure and maintain Informix Logs? The logs are critical to database reliability, and we will discuss best practices for managing and configuring Informix logical logs. We will also cover the backup and recovery of logical logs.
Disk IO is often the performance bottleneck for databases, every transaction needs to get written safely to disk fast. How do you set up and configure the disk space for an Informix Server? What disk and RAID configurations provide the best performance and reliability?
Informix Tutorials Webcast Replay – Informix Tutorial – Configuring a New Informix Server by Lester Knutsen, February 27, 2020.
How to script configuring an Informix Server? This Webcast will cover everything you need to know to build with scripts, a new medium, or large server. The Webcast will be a review of the Informix ONCONFIG file and configuring memory, CPUs, Network, and Disk for a more extensive Informix Server configuration.
Informix Tutorials Webcast Replay – Getting Started with Informix by Lester Knutsen on Thursday, January 30, 2020, The Webcast is a step by step guide to installing and getting up and running a basic Informix Server. We will demonstrate using InformixHQ, the IBM Informix Knowledge Center, and how to find resources to get started with Informix.
Informix has Automated Update Statistics built into the server. Update Statistics collects metrics to enable the server to run your SQL faster. How do you monitor what tables and indexes need to have the statistics updated and manage Automated Update Statistics (AUS)?
How does the Informix SQL Optimizer choose which index or table or access method to use when running your SQL? This presentation will focus on how to view and understand the SQL Explain plan to see how your SQL is executed. The SQL Explain plan will provide times for each step in your process.
This presentation will focus on Best Practices for Informix database indexes. Every table should have at least one index, and managing indexes is an integral part of a DBA’s task and time. Indexing is one method to optimize the performance of a database by reducing the number of disk reads when a query is executed. An index is a structure which is used to locate and access a row in a database table quickly. Indexes are used to enforce uniqueness, primary, and foreign keys and constraints. Indexes can also be a source of problems in a database and may slow performance down when misused.
At some point, every system gets outdated or starts showing its age. We all have had to deal with the headaches and logistical nightmares of moving our core databases from a legacy system on to a new server. In this webcast, we will cover different ways in which you can leverage Informix Enterprise Replication to move from an old server to a new one with minimal downtime, headache, and infrastructure needed. We will be covering cases of needing to handle the potential for fail backs, migrating between different OS platforms, as well as covering ideas to minimize end user interruption.
The second part of this webcast will further examine the Informix utilities which can be used to migrate data to a new system, and how to combine different utilities to speed up migrations and minimize downtime.
Migrating your Informix databases to new hardware and operating systems can be a daunting task. During this webcast, we will look at some of the challenges involved, and things to consider when migrating. We will look at the various tools available in Informix which can be used to unload and load data and cover the use of dbexport and dbimport.
IBM just announced the exciting new Informix 14 version in March. Advanced DataTools taught our first course for Informix DBAs on release 14 in April. We have been part of the beta programs and would like to share our findings including how to use the new installer, how to upgrade a database, and an introduction to the new Informix HQ server management.
End to end security is becoming more critical every day. In this webcast, we will demonstrate step by step how to set up basic SSL encryption for the Informix engine and how to configure ODBC clients for Windows and Linux to make sure all of your data is secured in transit.
Informix includes many Advanced SQL OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) functions that are rarely used, and we will demonstrate how to take advantage of them. OLAP is Business Intelligence queries that allow users to perform reporting for sales, marketing, inventory control, business processes, and many other functions. Typically it would require a multi-dimensional database. SQL OLAP functions allow you to roll-up, roll-down and slice and dice your data. We will demonstrate examples of Window Partitioning of data (before and after group by), Ranking, using row numbers, and before and after rows using ANSI SQL-99 standards, known as the Elementary OLAP package.
Art Kagel developed and maintains the popular open source utility dostats to enable you to automate and keep up to date catalog statistics and data distribution that the Informix Optimizer needs in order to select the best method of running your SQL statements. He will describe how it works, how to compile it on several platforms, and why you should upgrade to the latest version. He will also discuss the Informix Automated Update Statistics (AUS) and how that compares to dostats.
An overview of using Informix External Tables for unloading and loading data and the benefits that they offer.
How do you capture the cost of SQL statements and activity on your database server. We will take a look at SQL Trace, and the Sysmaster tables that enable you to save and analyze the costs of your SQL.
Whether you are reorganizing a table, loading a table or doing a full data migration, you will want to use the unload/load capabilities of Informix. This is an in depth look at the various options available to you in such an endeavor as well as issues which should be taken into consideration.
Have you ever had a large batch job that had to be rerun from scratch when the primary server crashed after the job had been running for many hours? Wouldn’t you like to have that job just continue running when your secondary server takes over? You can! This will be a live demonstration of how to configure your servers to take advantage of the Informix Transaction Survival feature.
This presentedesentation will demonstrate how to take advantage of the automatic Range Interval Partitioning and Rolling Windows to fragment your huge Informix tables. Automatically adding new partitions and fragments by interval can replace elaborate fragmentation schemes easily. The feature includes the ability to automatically drop partitions of old data reducing the need to purge old data.
The Informix database depends on the operating system for the CPU, Memory, Disk and Network resources. The presentation will focus on optimizing the Unix, AIX and Linux OS for the best database performance. We will review Kernel Settings, HugePages, enabling and disabling CPUs, OS disk scheduling, SAR and other tools for monitoring Unix and Linux.
For years Informix users who backup to local disks have been stuck with the limits of ontape or the tediousness and slowness of the Informix TSM system. Introduced in version 12 there is the brand new PSM system. Tom will cover the basics of getting started using it and may have you rethinking your backup strategies.
This session will cover Getting Started with Enterprise Replication.
This session will cover comparing similar data types. A review of normalization. Implementing difficult relationships.
This session will cover some of the basics of Informix Tuning, with a focus on monitoring and tuning of queries. Some of the areas that will be covered include: Identifying long running queries, Explain plans, Optimizer directives, Monitoring the buffer pool usage, Checking statistics, and Finding busy tables
This is the latest Webcast replay of Lester’s talk on Exploring the Sysmaster database. He presented cripts to monitor and tune your Informix Server and perform a system health check. Examples include how to tell what is the most expensive query running on your server now, what page size is best for your tables, what indexes are used and not used, how is memory used on your server, and much more…. These scripts will help you identify the performance bottlenecks on your Informix Server.
Virtual Machines have many advantages and disadvantages. This Webcast will explore the best practices for running Informix in a Virtual Machine. We will look at small and large databases in virtual machines. A monster virtual machine is a VM with lots of memory, CPUs and disks. I have had the opportunity to performance tune many Informix database servers running in a virtual environment and will share some of the problems and solutions for Informix to work well in VM. We will talk about everything from a VM on my laptop to a VM with more than 256 GB of memory and more than 96 Virtual CPUs.
Mike discusses how to setup and use Informix auditing to monitor the usage of your database servers.
Tom discusses how to setup and use the connection manger to provide fail-over and capability to your database servers.
This is a continuation of an earlier Webcast on Informix Configuration, ONCONFIG, CPUs, and Memory.
This webcast will focus on best practices for Informix DBAs on Backup, Recovery, and High Availability Disaster Recovery (HDR).
This webcast will focus on best practices for Informix DBAs including why Not to use RAID5.
This webcast will focus on best practices for Informix DBAs including:
* CPU Recommendations and Best Practices
* Memory Recommendations and Best Practices
* ONCONFIG Recommendations and Best Practices
This webcast will focus on best practices for Informix DBAs including:
* Informix Products Overview
* Informix Architecture – Memory, CPU, Disk Requirements
* Planning an Informix Install
* Installing Informix
* Software Directory Structure
* Using Informix SQL
* Informix Documentation
* Informix Resources on the Web
With the emergence of ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) we are all collecting more data than ever. Every company wants to get as much data as possible and have it available for use as even faster. With this new mentality of getting data there quickly, new methods of application development have become common. With the focus squarely on the application it has changed how the database sits in the corporate structure. Informix has grown and changed to meet the changing needs of the data economy. In this talk we will be covering a number of the new features that Informix has introduced in the last several years to meet the era of Big Data. We also are going to talk about several complimentary utilities that work hand in hand with Informix to better manage and make sense of the volumes of new data coming in. We will explain what NoSQL is and why you should care about a new method to store and manage data. Also we will talk about the new REST and Mongo listeners and show how that is changing the face of how we can access our Informix data. Join us for this look over some of the new facets of the changing Informix landscape.
This is a replay of Art Kagel’s Webcast on October 20, 2015 on Informix Storage and the impact of RAID levels, why not to use RAID 5 and what RAID levels work best with modern databases.
Lester takes an Informix 4GL application written in 1993, called DBPrivileges, and guides you through the process of converting it into a modern application that can be run on Windows, Mac, iPad, Mobile or on the Web.
This final webcast of the series will focus on installing and setting up Informix. Intended mainly for new adopters of the IBM Informix database product, Tom will demonstrate how this advanced and powerful database engine is simple to install and configure on just about any hardware.
This webcast will explore some of the ARM-based computers that are available, and describe why ARM is such a good fit for an IoT solution. Tom will show how simple it is to install a full version of the IBM Informix database server on a low-power, affordable ARM-based Linux computer, and why the power and simplicity of Informix makes it ideal for an embedded IoT gateway.
This webcast will describe Informix TimeSeries, why it is such a good fit for an IoT solution, and show how it can be used to efficiently store sensor data. Examples of querying TimeSeries data will be shown and then displayed on a web page served from a Beaglebone ARM computer. The sensor data will be pushed out to a cloud, and an example will be shown using APIs to retrieve the data and display it.
This is the first webcast in our series and will introduce Informix and the Internet of Things and give an overview of the different components. It will include a practical demonstration of data from sensors being stored on a Beaglebone Black ARM computer and pushed to the cloud. This webcast will show how simple sensor data can be read using an Arduino-based microcontroller and conclude with the data being received on the Beaglebone gateway.
Lester again presented new scripts to monitor and tune your Informix Database server using the Sysmaster and Sysadmin Databases. This is major update to his most popular talk at the International Informix User Group (IIUG) conferences over many years – “Exploring the Sysmaster Database”.
Art Kagel, is an Independent consultant and IIUG Board Member, presented on programming, concurrency, and tuning applications against Informix. This is an update to the presentation Art did at our last Washington Area Informix User Group Meeting. (Note: there are a few problems with the sound, I tried to fix it as best as I could)
Do you have an Informix database and need to encrypt columns with privacy information? Do you have time to change all of your production applications to implement encryption? Have you had a security or FISMA/DISA audit? Lester Knutsen will present how we have converted existing Informix databases to add column level encryption with minimal impact to your existing applications. He will demonstrate how to take an Informix database and change it to use encrypted columns with little impact to your front end applications using triggers, functions and Informix encryption. Lester will also discuss simplifying access using roles to grant and revoke privileges.
This is the final of a series of four Webcasts, one a month, providing a tutorial on how to use Informix with PHP.
This is the third of a series of four Webcasts, one a month, providing a tutorial on how to use Informix with PHP.
This is the second of a series of four Webcasts, one a month, providing a tutorial on how to use Informix with PHP.
This is the start of a series of four Webcasts, one a month, providing a tutorial on how to use Informix with PHP.
The Open Admin Tool (OAT) is one of the most exciting and least talked about new features for Informix in the past few years. It is an open platform to manage your Informix instances through a convenient web interface. In this talk we will be breaking down how to get up and running with OAT and covering many of the basic tasks you can perform in it. Since version 11 was released many people have migrated up to it, however most of them have either not gotten OAT up at all or looked at it briefly and put it back down. Listen to the webcast and we will tell you why you want to go to the latest release of OAT and why you should be using it every day. Some of the highlights:
*Get step by step instructions to getting it running on a variety of operating systems
*Learn about monitoring replicated environments using your web browser
*See different ways to get very easy to read visual guides to the health of your database
*Learn how to safely give your Jr DBA the ability to add new space without having to worry every time he does
*See how to browse your database without needing to use dbaccess or SQL
*Find out how to easily get reports that you can give to management showing how much Informix is racing along
Art presents UPDATE STATISTICS in depth, dostats, and his other free utilities for monitoring and tuning an Informix database in his utils2_ak package. Topics covered will include:
*Table Level statistics and data distributions
*Fragment Level statistics and data distributions
*Update statistics for procedure/function
*Providing data distributions for User Defined Types
*Dostats and the art of balancing distribution quality with runtime performance
*Other useful utilities in the utils2_ak package
This is a replay of our Webcast on October 15, 2013 to announce the results and winners of the Fastest Informix DBA Contest. Informix DBA’s from around the world participated in the challenge to be the Fastest in a combination of OLTP and batch benchmark. The winner is the DBA who had the most transactions per minute in an OLTP benchmark and at the same time run a batch billing job and generate the most bills in a 10 minute run.
This Webcast will demo and benchmark the Informix Warehouse Accelerator 12.10. Last year we showed it running 9 hours of queries in 14 minutes. Mike Walker will demonstrate our current benchmarks with this exciting new database technology. He will demonstrate ad-hoc queries on a bookstore database with 250 million customers and over a billion records in the fact table.
This is a replay of our Fastest Informix DBA Contest 2013 status update Webcast on August 20, 2013. This year the Fastest Informix DBA Contest will be held over the web so anyone, anywhere in the world can participate from July 9 to 31, 2013. The challenge will be a combination of OLTP and batch. The winner will be the DBA who can get the most transactions per minute in an OLTP benchmark and at the same time run a batch billing job and generate the most bills in a 10 minute run. For more information on the Fastest Informix DBA Contest click here!
This year the Fastest Informix DBA Contest will be held over the web so anyone, anywhere in the world can participate from July 9 to 31, 2013. The challenge will be a combination of OLTP and batch. The winner will be the DBA who can get the most transactions per minute in an OLTP benchmark and at the same time run a batch billing job and generate the most bills in a 10 minute run.
Lester Knutsen and Mike Walker will present a series of tools to monitor and tune your Informix Database Server.
*Using SQL Trace to monitor user sessions
*Tips for Remote DBA monitoring
* Building a Monitoring Dashboard with Yellowfin BI
Lester presented new scripts for monitoring and tuning your Informix Database server using the Sysmaster and Sysadmin Database. This is an update of Lester’s most popular talk at Informix user conferences over the past several years, “Exploring the Sysmaster Database”, and will show what is new in Informix 12.10.
Art went through the steps one takes to determine the health of the server and start Informix Database Performance Tuning:
* Overall Performance
* IO Performance
* Tablespace Performance
* Memory Performance
* Virtual Processor Performance
* OS Performance
* Caches
What do Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, and Yahoo all have in common? They all run on PHP. PHP is an open source server-side scripting language designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages. And it works great with the fastest database, Informix. In this talk we will be discussing how quick and easy it is get going in PHP and how to set up PHP to talk to Informix using the PDO driver library. You can easily use PHP to select, insert, update and delete data from an Informix database to create a database driven web site.
4 – Key to Enterprise Data Warehouse Development: Data Marts are Building Blocks to the Enterprise (Part of the “Building a Data Warehouse Series”)
3 – Successfully Transform and Load Your DataWarehouse: Using the Informix Data Warehouse Feature (Part of the “Building a Data Warehouse Series”)
2 – Fast Data Warehouse Schemas: Deploying a Star Schema (Part of the “Building a Data Warehouse Series”)
1 – Rapid Data Warehouse Development: Build a Pilot in 8 weeks! (Part of the “Building a Data Warehouse Series”)
On Jun 19, 2012, we held a webcast with the Fastest Informix DBA Winner Andrew Ford, hosted by Lester Knutsen and Art Kagel, to share with other Informix users how the winners achieved their results. Learn about the tips and tricks the real Fastest Informix DBAs used to achieve their remarkable performance.
Our Webcast to demo the Informix Warehouse Accelerator on February 28, 2012. We have been using the Informix Warehouse Accelerator for over a year and I am continually shocked at how fast it is. In one set of benchmarks it ran 9 hours of queries in 14 minutes. Mike Walker, Art Kagel, and I will demonstrate our current benchmarks with this exciting new database technology. We will demonstrate ad-hoc queries on a bookstore database with 250 million customers and over a billion records in the fact table.
This is a replay from our webcast reviewing the results of our Fastest Informix DBA Contest II, done online in the fall of 2009, discussing how the winners did it. Congratulations to Tatiana Saltykova, new 1st place finisher in the Fastest Informix DBA contest! The challenge was to take a batch billing SQL job that took over 40 hours to run and optimize it and the Informix database configuration.