Cheetah in the wild!

No chat talk:


The Open Beta of Cheetah was officially announced. You can get in on:
http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ids/new

IBM create a public web support forum at: Cheetah open Beta support
and there is a new infocenter at: Cheetah InfoCenter
As promised, IBM delivered a public open Beta product. This will give the chance to everyone of us to test it, view and work with the new incredible features that R&D have put in this release.

The feature specification is really impressive. Some of them are by far the deepest changes in IDS I've seen since I started working with it in 1998. It doesn't matter what is your role (DBA, Developer...). You'll find some features specifically directed to some of your major pain points.

A quick list of the features:

• Backup and Restore to Directories with ontape
  Adds flexibility specially if used with the next feature
  
• Continuous Logical Log Restore
  Besides HDR, you have another option to disaster recovery or to get a quick copy of your instance. The second instance will be on rollforward until you need it
  
• Improved Parallelism during Backup and Restore
  OnBar got a lot smarter. It's able to make faster backups and specially restores. Full system backups can be done in parallel now (as it should have been from the start if I may say it... :) )
  
• Named Parameters in a Callable Statement
• Indexable Binary Data Types
  Well... not really new. We've got it in 10.00.xC6. An evidence on how easy IDS features travel through product families
  
• Encrypted Communications for HDR
  Enterprise Replication (ER) already had it. Now you can use encryption on High availability Data Replication (HDR). It's not a must have in LAN, but very useful if you replicate across public or semi-public networks.
  
• RTO Policy to Manage Server Restart
  Killer... IDS can tune itself to assure a user defined fast recovery interval. You specify that want the server up again in 2 minutes... IDS will manage checkpoint intervals to assure this. It can also auto tune LRU cleaning and AIO VPs. The RTO is a big step in self in direction to a self managed system. Of course you may wonder why we need it, since it's normally up and running without issues? Well, IDS tends to have greater uptimes than the hardware... at least in my experience.
  
• Non-blocking Checkpoints
  Wow... Serial killer! Got your system tuned for everyday load and have seen it 'hang' in a very long checkpoint after some special maintenance (index, table moving....)? No more! Checkpoint locks will be a small (if ever noticeable) fraction of a second. LRU flushing will be done concurrently with normal transaction processing.
  It's easy to imagine that this kind of feature takes very serious thinking, working and testing. But R&D did it. Besides this you'll get a lot of very useful info about checkpoints with a new onstat -g ckp option...
  
• Trigger Enhancements
  One trigger for each type operation is not enough? Now you can have several triggers on the same table for each type of operation (Insert, Delete, Update... )
  
• Truncate Replicated Tables
  You can now use truncate on tables involved in ER
  
• Derived tables in the FROM Clause of Queries
  Ty
• Tired of writing "SELECT .... FROM TABLE (....)"?. Ok... Then use the general "SELECT ... FROM (SELECT ...). A usability feature that will facilitate application porting from other RDBMS
  
• Index Self-Join Query Plans
  Not new... Reviewed in the last article. Another example of code portability between product families
  
• Optimizer Directives in ANSI-Compliant Joined Queries
• Optimistic concurrency
  Serial killer part II... You don't like dirty reads (who likes?!) and your application keeps waiting on locks because of bad programming or due to high concurrency? No problem! Just set an ONCONFIG parameter, or an environment variable and either DIRTY READ or COMMITTED READ or both (or none) will work in the new mode: LAST COMMITTED READ. No more lock waiting. You'll get the image before commit. No need to change application code
  
• Enhanced Data Types Support in Cross-Server Distributed Queries
  Some improvements in distributed queries. More data types supported
  
• Improved Statistics Maintenance
  If like me, you're mad for having to scan a table to create statistics for some columns where you've just created an index (which makes a scan of the data and a sort...), than you can rest. Now, an index creation will automatically calculate column distributions and index and table data.
  
• Deployment Wizard
  New features. Much more control about want you want installed. Your installations can become smaller (not that they were big...)
  
• Performance Improvements for Enterprise Replication like trigger firing during synchronization (already in 10.00.xC6) and dynamically change ER configuration parameters and environment variables
  
• Schedule Administrative Tasks
  Database cron. You can schedule jobs inside the database
  
• Query Drill-Down to Analyze Recent SQL Statements
  Tracing SQL. Choose who you want to trace, how much etc. Turn it on, off and change it dynamically
  
• SQL Administration API
  Ever wanted to add a chunk through dbaccess? If you're like me, probably not, BUT... this will allow every maintenance to be done through client side tools. I think this will fuel a lot of innovation around IDS management environments.
  
• LBAC
  Label Based Access Control. Just like in DB2. This is powerful and clean. But my first impression is that it will require lots of thinking before use. You have to structure you access policies. The tooling is there, but has to be correctly used.
  
• XML
  XML publishing, XML extraction... The type of data centric XML use that we need. DB2 on the other side (Viper release, v9) has an XML engine inside it. The perfect choice for document centric applications.
  
• Node datablade
  Indexable hierarchical data. It was available, but now is part of the product and fully supported
• sysdbopen/sysdbclose
  Ah!!! It was rumored to appear in 10.00.xC1, but never did it. Now it's here. Do you want to change lock mode or isolation level for blackbox applications? No problem. Create a sysdbopen procedure and the user(s) will run whatever you put in there right after connect and before anything else that the application sends.
  

So... I've already tested some of this features and I got really impressed. Now it's possible for everybody to test them. Bare in mind a few thoughts:

1. This is a Beta product. It's not supposed to be perfect. There are issues and a few features aren't already there. (stay tuned for more Beta drops)
2. Don't use it in production. The product should be able to migrate a supported version to the 11.10 release. But it's not guaranteed that you can migrate between Beta drops. Use it for test only purposes and to inspect the new features.
3. The product has a time limitation... Again don't use it for serious work. Use it for serious testing
4. Feedback, feedback... IBM is surely making a big effort to push this. It's the first time I recall seeing an Informix product in open beta testing. The R&D and support personal are very motivated by this effort. If you can spare a few moments, please report any issues you find, give suggestions and ask questions. Your response will be the first reward these people will feel, and believe me... They deserve it.
   

A final non technical note:

Ever since the acquisition in 2001, we've been listening FUD from competitors saying that IBM would kill Informix. It wouldn't make sense to keep two competitive RDBMS systems. According to this FUD customer should move. Of course, people launching the FUD were expecting customers to migrate in their directions. Now... What do we all know about FUD? We all know it stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. It doesn't stand on Facts, it's Unfounded and we must Doubt it. Let's recall the facts:

1. Since 2001, IBM released 3 major IDS releases:
1. 9.40 with major changes in scalability (Big chunks), usability (manageabilty) and security (PAM)
2. 10.0 with major code changes (configurable page size, table level restore, ER enhancements, default roles, better partitioning....)
3. 11.1 with all of the above
2. IBM kept support for IDS 7.31. In fact 7.31 was enhanced with the new btree cleaner and other minor features. Some intermediate release levels were discontinued (9.21, 9.30)
   
3. Meanwhile, since 2001 an RDBMS vendor name O.... has discontinued two products (every release levels): version 8 and version 9 (this year, more or less at the same time Cheetah will be released) forcing it's customers to migrate. And let me remind you how easy is to migrate IDS...
   

So, thinking as a customer, whom do you think will protect your investment? If there was still any doubt about the IBM commitment to Informix, Cheetah should be enough to clear it.
But as we all know, FUD will always be around. Hopefully we'll all be too busy playing with this beloved "cat", exploring new ways to bring value to our organizations and customers to pay any attention to it.

Regards.