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IBM Informix Database in the Cloud

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I spent the last two days at the International Informix User Group Conference in Overland Park, Kansas. The Conference was packed with 240+ Informix architects, DBAs, customers, system integrators and IBM employees, despite bad weather including thunder storms and tornado warnings.

Informix Dynamic Server Express and Workgroup editions are now available in the Cloud. IBM had made an announcement last February in which they offered free IDS and DB2 developer editions in the cloud. Last week, they also announced their pay-by-the-hour licensing for IDS and DB2. More info is available on our Partner page.

Guy Bowerman, IDS Architect and Suma Vimod, IDS Data Expert, created a few demos for sessions that leverages IDS functionality in the cloud. Guy also blogged about the conference at the IBM DeveloperWorks Blog.

As a part of the conference, we built several demos:

Getting started with IDS and Amazon Web services
This demo shows how you can run the Informix Dynamic Server 11.50 UC3 version on Amazon EC2. It shows you in step-by-step fashion, how you can use the AWS Management Console, spawn up one of the public IDS 32-bit AMIs and configure the instance, configure IDS, use the OpenAdmin tool, and so forth. This demo is a must-see for those who are interested in running Informix in the cloud.

Ibm2

 

High Availability Demo 
This demo shows off some of the advanced features of Informix in the Cloud.
It shows how an IDS MACH11 cluster containing an IDS Primary server instance and an IDS High-availability Data Replication (HDR) Secondary server instance can run in the Amazon EC2 environment to create a highly available IDS Cluster. The IDS Connection Manager runs on a client instance (in the cloud or locally) allowing applications to connect to the Primary or Secondary server as needed. The demo also shows how the Connection Manager can manage automatic failover to another Amazon Availability Zone for applications connected to a Primary server, should it become unavailable.

IDS High Availablity Demo

The Informix Spatial data in the Cloud
This demo shows how the IBM Informix Spatial DataBlade can implement business logic that involves geographic data. It also shows how the Informix Web Feature Service (WFS) DataBlade can provide access to geographic web services, all in the context of multiple IDS instances running in the cloud and sharing data through replication.

.Spatial DataBlade demo

Its really cool when you can see the latest version of IDS running in the Cloud and also some of the advanced features of IDS (HA and HDR) leveraging the cloud. We are also investigating the use of On-Bar/ontape (the Informix tape backup tools) can upload archives and storage spaces directly to Amazon S3 serially or all in parallel.

One of the aspects that I really like about Amazon EC2 is that it not only gives developers the flexibility and the control to put any database in the Cloud but also provides the choice of running different commercial-grade databases (Oracle, DB2, Informix, MySQL) and take advantage of the advanced features.

If you are using Informix currently and would like to take advantage of the cloud, we would love to know more.

– Jin

Modified 2/1/2021 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.