RE: An interesting meeting with IBM

Interesting stuff. Was there any talk of offering fixpaks (IBM terminology) for IDS 7.x and 9.x? It annoys me that for DB/2 I get e-mail alerts of customer support issues. I can go onto the website and check on the status of all the bugs and fixes in DB/2 and every so often a new fixpak will appear which I can download to include all the various bugfixes (DB/2 V8.1 is up to FP5 and v7 up to FP11). Why after all this time do we not have the same thing for IDS? Checkout these links for details:- http://www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/db2www/data/db2/udb/winos2unix/support/db2alert.d 2w/report http://www-306.ibm.com/cgi-bin/db2www/data/db2/udb/winos2unix/support/downlo ad.d2w/report David. -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Hamm [mailto:ahamm@mail.com] Sent: 07 April 2004 08:04 To: informix-list@iiug.org Subject: An interesting meeting with IBM Folks, Yesterday we had an interesting techo/positioning meeting with some IBM staff. The attendees were nearly all locals (Australia) excepting a representative of the IDS development team from US. The IBM'ers were a mix of techies, managers and supply chain staff; from both sides of the aquisition (ie some were long-term Informix, some long-term IBMers) These IBM Informix presentations have been targeted at the top 100 Informix partners globally. 10 of these were based in the Asia/Pacific region. I think meeting with 100 partners was just an arbitrary limit of practicality. Hopefully this posting will share a lot of details with the smaller players. I'd also like to hear any alternative perspectives from anyone else who has sat though one of these meetings. The meeting predominately discussed IDS and DB/2, WebSphere and 4GL, and a small admission of slackness with Informix positioning (!) and recent supply issues. I don't believe there are any trade secrets in here, although I suppose some points could be exploited by rabid members of other DB suppliers. Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone; for example, before someone from Oracle can gloat about the words here regarding ease of admin of DB/2, they need to consider the cost of administering Oracle... This posting is largely based on our internal note-taking which has been passed around. I'm posting it in the hope that it will help to strengthen the Informix community. ** Engine, General info - IBM welcomes working with partners with regards to feature requests, and the possibility of implementing these into future releases. - Defect Backlog has dropped to about 15% of the count just prior to the takeover [15% is my guess from the graphs and numbers tossed into the air]. Note that the peak of defects around 2002 was partly due to the very major work that was required to create the Universal Server features (UDT, datablades, etc) - All customers are very strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest versions due to the major reduction in the Defect Backlog - IDS development staff have been given a large increase of resources. - IBM afforded the purchase of a very large testing machine farm, so that testing now applies 60,000 tests on 9 different platforms within a week; a task that used to take 3 months (only on Solaris) prior to IBM. These 9 platforms are now teir 1 platforms, as opposed to the older model: Solaris, then 5 teir-one's, then the strays.... - The tests are applied across enough machines to ensure that virtually every test is applied overnight. The tests are striped around the machines so that each machine applies all tests within the week. - With the nightly tests, if a new piece of code is checked in that affects performance by as little as 1% in some area, it will be automatically flagged for follow-up the next day. - IBM policy demands that no release is made if there are any level 1 and level 2 severity defects. Sign-off will not be granted unless this can be proved. - IDS has a development plan that takes it to version 9.8 in 2008; beyond that, nobody plans any further ahead... - Development of new features in IDS has accelerated (approx 40%?) since IBM - Uptake of the 9.40 engine has been the fastest ever, for any upgrade ever released - Approx 50% of all 9.40 deliveries has been for Linux. - IDS has received a lot of code from DB/2. For example, in 9.4, the GLS system was revamped with UNICODE source taken directly from DB/2 - Multi-level security will be brought in from DB/2. - IDS will be progressively enhanced so that it integrates very tightly with the entire IBM product line; eg Tivoli, Websphere and other products I'm only dimly aware of. "Software Group Integration" ???. If another product applies SQL's that are not handled vvery well with IDS, then either IDS or the product or both will be optimised. - IDS is giving a lot of source code to DB/2. For example, HDR code is being added to DB/2 instead of re-inventing it. - Both engine teams are sharing optimiser ideas. - IBM is striving to emulate the simplicity and ease of administration that IDS has. By 2008 they plan to make DB/2 as easy to manage as IDS. ** Planned IDS 9.50 Features - Further improvements to "Safety" and HDR (ease of use in particular) - Further improvements to increase availability (ie during admin) - Autonomic admin (eg self-repair of tables with excessive extent fragmentation, automatic update stats) - Integration into IBM toolset - Multilevel Security (sourced from DB/2 as recently released in v.8) - Faster restarts - Table level Point-in-time restores - Query/SQL plan tracing tools - Backup/Restore (??? what does this mean?) - Native .NET driver - MS Visual Studio integration - Java 3.0 (JDBC) compliance. This requires quite a number of added features just to be able to achieve full JDBC compliance. - XML Shredding / Publishing. XML will be storable efficiently, and Xsearches will be optimised and efficient. - Web portal / sphere integration (certified release) - SQL standards compliance - ESQL/C to DRDA integration (i.e. re DB2) - DRDA integration within IDS server (fully integrated by IDS 9.6) - Transaction / 2-Phase commits for MQ series - Better Tivoli integration, possibly with a bundle of "Tivoli Lite" to replace ISM - Encryption - down to column level. - Variable PAGE size upon initialization - 2k, 4k, 8k, 16k or 32k. - Default roles for users - Single user admin mode which allows access to data via SQL for privileged user. - Rename dbspace (this is in 9.4.UC3) - Better role separation re DB admin - Truncate table (Jonathan, did we win after-all on the logging issue?) - Optimizer improvements query plans (i.e. 9.40 was optimized more for OLTP) - Greater SHMEM - Extensibility in UDR's, including multi-engine use - Refined installation, allowing to only install components of the server, i.e. reducing foot-print of install. - Improved admin tools with more alerts and alarms ** Planned IDS 9.60 features (2007) - Any customer/partner requests - Improved