Andrew Ford wrote:
>> Report please. thanks.
>>
>
>

Hey, Andrew, you COULD have left something for the rest of us to report on!

Seriously though, this was a GREAT conference. It was billed as the
first Informix Only conference since the
IBM acquisition. It was touted to be the greatest conference of all.
If you spoke to our illustrious IIUG President,
Stuart Litel, during the year the superlatives listed over the year
since the board came up with the idea were never
ending!

Well, the reality? Honestly this conference met ALL of my own
expectations and amazingly enough it even fulfilled
and exceeded ALL of Stuart's predictions. I'm sure that when Stuart
said a few months ago that the conference was
going to sell out he was at least half hopeful - but we DID sell out!
It was quite a different experience from the
previous years with IDUG! The first year I attended IIUG/IDUG in 2005 I
would see a face or two that I recognized
as Informix users and a half dozen Informix/IBM insiders I knew by sight
and recognized a dozen other company names
as Informix users. By the 2007 event, yes I now knew almost a hundred
Informix and IBM faces and recognized a
couple of dozen company names, but even so there were many hundreds of
faces that could only belong to DB2-ers
and most of those mainframe users with no clue at all of what we 'small
system' folk do with our time. This year at the
-IIUG ONLY- conference: I could be sure that every face I saw that was
not wearing a red Marriott jacket was an
Informix user or Informix/IBM insider! It was a mind blowing experience.

The food was great, but as Stuart said to me: "With me in charge, did
you expect it wouldn't be?" Everyone's needs
were taken into consideration. There were vegetarian options for anyone
who needed or wanted it, four of us had
Kosher meals made available and lots salads, coffee and ice cream to
supplement them. I heard no complaints about
the food or the conference content from anyone - also a big change from
previous years.

I think my exclamation point key is broken. Over the last four years
we've seen the attitude at IBM change from
incomprehension through confusion to grudging support. This year it was
clear that IBM has finally gotten it! (Ooo
the key's working again!) The first two years I attended meetings
IBMers wanted to know "What should our message
be?". Last year they wanted to know "How can we do a better job of
getting the message out?". Improvement! This
year the question was: "Here's how we're planning to get the message
out. What else can we do?" Big change!

Thanks Andrew for the play-by-play! To the Conference Planning
Committee (CPC) and the entire 2007/2008 Board of
Directors (BOD) - you've already gotten my personal appreciation in
person at the first 2008/2009 BOD meeting and
throughout this week! However, here's a public pat on the back for a
job well done. On to next year! Planning has already
begun and Stuart will give you details as soon as the BOD nails them
down. Leave it for now to say the expressed intent of
the BOD is to make next year's conference bigger and better.

Art S. Kagel
IIUG Board of Directors
Oninit

> 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
>
>
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>
>


--
Art S. Kagel
Oninit (www.oninit.com)
IIUG Board of Directors (art@iiug.org)