> Report please. thanks.

I think the conference was huge success, far exceeding the expectations of
many.

There were about 350 people attending the conference, more than double the
125 to 150 numbers from the last 3 conferences making this conference the
largest IDS event since the IBM acquisition.

Things started off on Sunday with the tutorial sessions, 8 1/2 day (4 in the
morning, 4 in the afternoon) training classes that could be attended for an
additional (reasonable) cost and 2 free all day vendor sponsored tutorials.
After a full day of packed tutorial sessions we had the Sunday night welcome
reception in the Exhibit hall with the vendors and an open bar (no drink
tickets required for this conference, so people visited the bar early and
often)

Monday morning Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of IBM Information Management,
got us started with a keynote address to a full room at 8 AM and then it was
off to the technical sessions at 9:30 AM. 4 concurrent tracks: Admin and
Performance, Applications and Tools, The Informix Edge and Advanced Support
Topics were run through the day. Each technical session was 1 hour and
there were 6 time slots each day (4 tracks * 6 time slots * 3 days = 72
total 1 hour technical sessions given by IDS developers, IDS support, IDS
Business partners, IDS DBAs and IDS Application Developers). I was able to
attend 2 great presentations: Top Tips Learned from Performance PMRs by Dr.
Elisibeth Bach from IBM Advanced Support and Engine Hangs, Debugging Methods
and Diagnostics Tools by Ron Privett from IBM Advanced Support. On Monday
night the IDS development and support teams from the Lenexa labs came to the
conference for the Developer/Support cook out (again, with open bar, dude.)
This was a great opportunity for the IDS users and IDS developers/support to
meet in person, the party officially ended at 8:30 PM but spilled out into
the hallway and hotel bar after the Exhibit Hall was closed.

Tuesday morning's keynote was again a full house and given by Arvind
Krishna, Vice President of IBM Data Management, where he announced the
release of Cheetah 2, IDS 11.5. This was great because now we could finally
be released from the NDA that came with the beta versions of 11.5 and
allowed the IDS development guys and gals to openly speak about writable
secondaries, connection managers and failover arbitrators (and have you seen
the 11.5 onconfig.std file?) More technical sessions during the day, I was
able to attend Continuous Availability in IDS by some new guy named Madison
Pruet, The High Performance Loader by Rob Beal, a Field Technical Specialist
for IBM and Accelerating IDS with solidDB, IBM's newly acquired in memory
database product that has plans to be available as an front end cache for
IDS to further improve OLTP performance. On Tuesday everyone loaded up in
chartered buses and went to a comedy club for a BBQ dinner, drinks and stand
up.

Wednesday was the last day but it was still a full day (literally, technical
sessions ran until 5:40 PM and discussions continued in the hall as the
hotel started cleaning up chairs and what not). At 8 AM we had the IIUG
Annual General Meeting where IIUG Director's Awards were given to Madison
Pruet (that new guy from IBM) and Eric Herber (father of the Informix-Zone,
all around good guy and really dedicated to the growth of IDS). After the
IIUG meeting which included a panel discussion with the people heading up
development, marketing, support and partners it was off to the final full
day of technical sessions. On Wednesday I made it to Making your Engine Hum
with ALICE and other BTSCANNER tips by Mark Jamison of IBM, IDS Performance
Tuning by Art Kagel (you may have heard of him), Modern Information Security
for the Internet by Tom Beebe from Advanced Data Tools and finally
Optimizing Linux of IDS by Alexey Sonkin from CDIC.

So that's the play by play of what went down each day but there is still so
much more to talk about.

The food was actually tasty and not just barely edible like most conference
food (did you get pork tenderloin or panko bread crumb encrusted chicken in
Denver, Tampa or San Jose? me either.) We were given breakfast each day, a
buffet style lunch with a choice of two deserts (you could have both, you
could have 10 if you wanted), a sugary snack in the afternoon to help make
it through the long day and something good to eat at each nightly function.
There was always plenty of sodas, water and fresh brewed coffee from the
starbucks in the halls from 7 AM to 6 PM.

The fact that this was an IDS only event made it something special. If
you've been to the previous conferences you know what it is like to try and
find the Informix folks in the crowd or to try to find the vendors that
speak Informix in the Exhibit Hall. This year there were no "so, do you use
Informix?" or "does your product work with Informix?" getting to know you
type questions being asked. Instead people were asking "how do you use
Informix?" or "how does your product work with Informix?" and that was a
great thing to see.

It was great having the event close to the Lenexa labs because this meant
new faces from IDS development and support could come and give presentations
we've never seen before. I have been lucky enough to attend the previous
conferences and it was great to see the new people and new presentations and
I don't think I was the only one hungry for content as each session I went
to was full of people wanting to learn. At the start of the second day
someone asked me if I knew where to find more legal pads because he had
already filled the one given to him in his conference bag with notes from
the sessions.

Of course there was free certification testing which offered the dreaded v11
certification test, v7, v9, v10 and 4gl certification testing. There was
the chance to try the Open Admin Tool and give feedback. There was the
chance the corner your favorite IDS developer and get the inside scoop on
how they want to make KAIO on linux more efficient. Conference goers had
the opportunity to grab as much conference schwag as they could carry home
with them including an "IDS is Everywhere" poster from IBM, swiss army
knives, frisbees, bags, CDs, clips and Cheetahs.

I think the Conference Planning Committee did a wonderful job putting on
this event in their personal time. This group of people is the perfect
combination of intelligent, dedicated and crazy and they are already talking
about scheduling the first CPC meeting for the 2009 conference. You can bet
the 2009 conference will be bigger and better.

For those that went - what did I leave out? For those that didn't go - Why
not and will we see you in 2009?

Andrew