Informix 14.10 - Release preview

Giessen, February 2019

CURSOR Service Distribution is part of the Informix 14.10 beta testing team. The impression we have of version 14.10 can only be revealed after the official release. Some details have already been published by the International Informix User Group (IIUG). We will take this generally available information as a starting point and briefly present the most important new features.

Licensing- Informix Workgroup Edition

Allowed resources increased from 16 GB to 32 GB main memory and from 16 CPU cores to 24 cores.

Especially technology partners will be pleased with this long-awaited expansion as it significantly improves the performance and scope of the Workgroup Edition, which is an important edition for integrators.

Licensing- Informix Enterprise Edition

Storage Optimization (data compression) becomes a general part of the Enterprise Edition.

All Informix 14.10 Enterprise Edition deployments now benefit from the long-established Storage Optimization feature. For customers already using data compression, the average database size has been reduced to a quarter, resulting in faster I/O operations and faster backups.

Data compression reduces storage requirements for primary-, secondary-, backup-, and log-data while improving performance by reducing I/O operations.

Administration - faster Replication

Improved replication enables client applications to maintain virtually latency-free connectivity between primary and secondary servers. This enables faster recovery in the event of server failure.

Administration - Enterprise Replication

Set up enterprise level replication of Informix instances or databases with Enterprise Replication.

It is a single command that automates enterprise replication setup and data migration between two Informix server instances, on-premise or in the cloud. This command automates tasks such as defining the enterprise replication domain between the two servers, adding key columns for the tables, creating the required storage space for the databases, copying database schemas from the source server to the target server, creating replication definitions, and finally synchronizing data between source and target server instances, all in a transactional, flexible, tiered manner with no downtime.

Administration – InformixHQ

InformixHQ is the new web console for visualizing, monitoring and managing Informix server instances. InformixHQ is specifically designed for easy operation, scaling and optimization of development and administration requirements and is shipped as part of version 14.10.

InformixHQ provides capabilities for monitoring critical performance parameters. The monitoring system can be integrated directly into an alarm system so that administrators can be notified immediately by e-mail, Twilio or PagerDuty.

InformixHQ is scalable and can efficiently monitor all Informix database server instances within an organization.

As an Informix service and support provider, we paid special attention to the new administration tool during the beta test. We will report in detail in a later article about the state of "the emperor's new clothes".

Industry 4.0 / Logistics

Informix 14.10 improves the granularity of time series and spatial projection.

By supporting subsecond time stamps, it can be used in environments with a very fast sequence of events.

For logistics, support for additional geodetic and projective systems will be introduced. This makes it possible, for example, to track shipments in their own coordinate system.

Security

Informix 14.10 provides increased security for encryption keys and integrated backup encryption.

By supporting the Remote Key Management Server to generate encryption keys and reducing the DBA effort required to encrypt Informix backups, data protection on backup media is increased without the risk of key loss. The encryption key itself is encrypted (Envelope Encryption).

Developer - Common table expression (CTE)

The implementation of the SQL standard CTE improves the readability and maintenance of complex queries for application developers. Developers can use CTE results multiple times in a query, perform pipeline aggregations, and write powerful recursive queries. Complex queries can be divided into simple, ad hoc logical building blocks.