IT'S ALL ABOUT THE DATA.
Columnists
Big Data
By Tom Deutsch
Data Warehousing
By Nancy Kopp
Governance
By Paula Wiles Sigmon
IDUG User View
By Joe Borges
IIUG User View
By Stuart Litel
Informix DBA
By Lester Knutsen
Rocketship to Planet Petabyte
By James Kobielus
The z Perspective
By Cristian Molaro
New Fastest Informix DBA Contest at the IIUG 2012 Informix User Conference
Congratulations to this year’s winners!
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PDFWe just completed the fifth Fastest Informix DBA Contest at this year’s IIUG Informix User Conference, sponsored by my company, Advanced DataTools Corporation. It was a great event and everyone had fun participating. Congratulations to Andrew Ford, the Grand Prize Winner of the new Apple iPad and Fastest Overall Informix DBA! Andrew’s results were almost three times faster than the next closest contestant’s results.
This contest has been one of the more fun events at the last few Informix User Conferences. This year, the contest was run on an Apple Mac Mini Server using Informix Enterprise 11.70.FC4. The server is very small and cheap—1.4 inches by 7.7 inches square—and costs under $1,400. The CPU is an Intel Core i7 with four cores, 8 GB of RAM, and two disk drives (one for the application and one for the database). It is amazing to see 1,000 user sessions running on this little box and to achieve the level of throughput that Andrew accomplished.
The goal of the contest is to see who can optimize an Informix database server running 1,000 OLTP users in under one hour and generate the most transactions per minute. Andrew generated over 57,000 transactions per minute.
We used the open source BenchmarkSQL Java program to generate the transactions for this contest. BenchmarkSQL is a JDBC benchmark that closely resembles the TPC-C standard for OLTP. It generates 1,000 sessions doing inserts, updates, and deletes against the Informix database server. I will describe the performance tuning measures that Andrew and the other constants used in a future article.
This was one of the best IIUG Informix User Conferences that we have ever had. The IIUG and conference planning committee did an awesome job pulling it all together. We had more Informix users in attendance than ever before, excellent information-packed sessions, and great food and parties. I look forward to more of these in the future. If you are an Informix user and were not able to attend, you really need to consider attending next year.
