Sitting on a flight to Las Vegas for the IOD conference affords an oportunity to tear myself away from the laptop and turn my attention to Carlton Doe's new book: Administering Informix Dynamic Server - Building the Foundation.

I should start by admitting a bias. I like Carlton, and from before I knew him I've liked his writing; he writes not only with energy and passion for the subject, but with a great deal of technical knowledge and experience. What this means is that you get all the information you would expect, but also something more than just a dry technical book. So, needless to say, I was looking foward to a chance to read this book.

Is there a need for an Informix book when there is a comprehensive set of high quality Informix documentation available online?

The documentation is great but there is a huge amount of it, and zeroing in on exactly what you need can take time. Carlton addresses this question in the introduction:

In this book, I try to take the dry technical details of the documentation and put them into the context of daily life. I cover topics in what I think is their logical order of occurrence when working with a database environment. First, you design the environment; then you build and populate it. You create backups on a regular basis and monitor and tune as necessary. There are other responsibilities and functions, but these are the most important. I use this approach to build the subjects discussed in each chapter.

One thing this book does very well is provide current information. A great deal of new functionality has been added to IDS in the last year, and knowing how much of a lead time publishing deadlines impose I am impressed by the amount of up to date 11.50 feature descriptions the book has. It can be stressful trying to write about a feature before release while the developers change it as you watch (OpenAdmin Tool which keeps getting new features is a good example). Somehow Carlton has managed to stay current, and write with an inside knowledge of which features are likely to change.

I'm glad to see a few in-jokes to keep us paying attention. In a section entitled Problem solving with Extensibility a fictitious org chart is introduced, where Mukta, Fred, Kevin and Kassa report to someone called Jerry. That sounds strangely familiar, though I can't quite place it.

At 424 pages Administering Informix Dynamic Server is small enough to carry around, yet comprehensive enough to serve as a single reference source. It also manages to provide a balance between introductory material for new Informix users and advanced technical information for Informix power users. After flicking through the backup and restore chapter I find myself drawn into a few diagrams and now know enough about XBSA architecture to be dangerous.

Overall, an excellent reference that both new and experienced Informix DBA's will find useful to have around.

Books links: Barnes & Noble, Amazon