News from the Informix World

And I do mean world. Well it's been a long time since my last post. Over six months. I just got back from the IBM Insight Conference in Las Vegas NV (formerly the IBM Information On Demand Conference) and there is some big news. IBM announced their new vertical cloud development stacks called BlueMix. There is a BlueMix for timeseries data, BlueMix for mobile apps, BlueMix for in-memory Warehouse data analytics, BlueMix for Watson, BlueMix for ... well you get the idea. The stacks include access to a cloud server with an application appropriate database system (Cloudant, DB2 BLU Accelerator, Informix, etc.), development tools, access to IBM and some third party analytics tools, etc. You can create a BlueMix account for free and try it out. If you like it and develop something on it for yourself, your company, or for distribution then you can work out a commercial deal with IBM for unlimited access and more resources. "Wait", you say, "did you say Informix as part of an IBM Cloud service offering? They just slapped that in there to make us noisy Informix grumps happy. Right?" Nope. If you set up a BlueMix for Timeseries Data configuration you get a fully functional Informix database server (not just timeseries support, though it's not clear if this includes IWA). While DB2 is available, you have to ask for it, the only full function RDBMS with a BlueMix configuration ready to go is Informix. Very cool! More soon when I will address the "world" teaser.