This week is IIUG conference week in Lenexa Kansas, and in this morning's keynote speech Dr. Arvind Krishna, VP for Data Servers, officially announced IDS 11.50, also known as Cheetah 2. Available in open beta program for a while, but until now closeted under NDA, we can finally talk about the new features in Cheetah 2. Here is a quick summary of what's new..

Administration

• Cluster management API Start/Stop, Add/Remove Configure
• Automated Update Statistics
• Configuration Wizard
• New Performance Graphs
• DRDA Config during Install
• Read-only access added to Open Admin Tool
• Row Versioning
• Wizard for creating new “tasks” and “sensors”

Application Development

• Dynamic SQL in SPL
• Additional IS [NOT] NULL support
• J/Foundation JRE 5.0 support
• DRDA enhanced Data Studio
• Tool to visualize explain output
• Basic Text Search support for XML and Xquery
• XML Transformations (XSLT) support
• BIGINT and BIGSERIAL

Security

• Single sign-on via Kerberos
• SSL Encryption

Mac OS/X Support

Continuous Availability

• Update any node in a cluster
• Connection Manager for balancing workload across nodes
• Policy-based Connections
• Arbitrator for flexible failover handling

The announcement is also covered in CNN Money: IBM Helps Clients Reduce Data Management Costs With New Informix Dynamic Server.

It is great to be at a conference that is all Informix all the time, with around 350 Informix users from around the world attending 4 different technical tracks, and as always good to catch up with people you know mostly through email and newsgroups. The organizers of this conference know how to cater for engineers, and load us up with sugary snacks every afternoon to help with those drowsy end of day presentations and dreary blog posts.