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Friday, May 8, 2015

LVARCHAR not long enough?

I've got some news for you!  If you had been to the IIUG 2015 Conference last week (April 26-30 2015) you might already know this.  If not, relax, 'cause I was there.

Question: Have you ever had a requirement for a character type that can hold strings longer than the 32K limit on the LVARCHAR type?  Don't want to have to deal with the hassles of storing and retrieving a BLOB or SLOB?

Welcome to Informix version 12.10!  I'm not sure in which sub-release this was actually implemented, but it definitely exists in .xC4 and later.  There is a new extended type, longlvarchar which is limited to 2GB strings!  Strings under 4K are stored in-table like ordinary LVARCHAR values, but longer strings are moved, invisibly, to a SmartBLOB Space.  So, you can now declare:

create table big_stuff (
       really_long_string longlvarchar,
       .....
);

Very cool!  This is a short one, I know, but it's been a busy week getting back into the normal swing of days after returning from San Diego, Mother's Day is ahead, and a short trip to visit a client next week, so I'll have to fill you all in on other things later.  TTFN.

Friday, March 20, 2015

News from the IIUG

Here's a link to an announcement from the IIUG Board of Directors talking about this year's IIUG 2015 Conference celebrating the 20th Anniversary Year of the IIUG:

IIUG News March 20, 2015

Twenty years!  Wow.  Who knew when the founding members of the IIUG, Lester Knutsen, Carlton Doe, Walt Hultgren, Malcolm Weallans, and Cathy Kipp sat down to plan a new Users' Group for customers of a small database company who's products were just beginning to hit their stride that their idea would grow into the singular most influential users' group at IT giant IBM!

Are you planning to attend the IIUG 2015 Conference in San Diego on April 26-30?  If so, have you registered and booked your room yet?

If not, why not?  IIUG 2013 was at the same location in San Diego, California and we all loved it.  The staff took very good care of us, the food was excellent (how could it not be with Stuart Litel planning the menu - talk about the ultimate foodie!), the sessions were great as were the tutorials on the last day, hands-on labs with IBM Informix legends to guide us and let us play with features we don't get to use in our daily grind, and we got to speak with IBM executives and developers and learn about the future of Informix!  IIUG 2014 Conference in Miami Florida was just as good.

Best of all, we get to do it all again in five weeks at IIUG 2015!

If you don't come this year, not only will you miss the best source of Informix information and networking in the world, but, besides all that, you will miss my secret announcement!  I will be announcing a new product at IIUG 2015 that will give your organization a leg up on its competition! If you are not there, you may not learn about it until months later and will have missed the one and only opportunity to Beta test!  Want a hint?  OK, just one in the form of a question: Could your organization benefit from being able to get its analytics completed faster and at a FAR lower cost than anything you may have or contemplate purchasing? DUH!

See you in San Diego!