That’s right, that RDBMS that was supposed to be dead 20 years ago according to pundits, but has actually been alive and well all these years.
IBM and it's IP partner HCL have just announced the release of Informix v15.0 which blows the lid off claims that RDBMS cannot handle the massive data that needs to be processed in today’s world. Informix 15 has removed nearly all of its limits. New features are industry shattering.
Here’s an overview:
Informix v14 limited a data page to 255 rows. V15 raises that to over 32000 rows (the actual limit is 65535 rows, but IBM stopped testing at 32000 so YMMV).
Informix v14 limited a table partition to 2^24 pages. V15 raises that to 2^48 pages. Most tables no longer require multiple partitions
Informix v14 supported several pages sized up to 16K. V15 adds 32K, 64K, 128L, & 256K pages increasing by 16X the amount of data per page and improving the performance of indexes for massive tables.
V15 increases both the maximum chunk (aka storage file) size from 4TB to 8PB per chunk and the maximum number of chunks supported.
The maximum data under management under v14 was ~8PB (already more than any other RDBMS). Under v15 that increases to half a yottabyte. That’s more than four times the entire contents of the Internet and, in practical terms, this is unlimited storage! No other RDBMS comes close to this capacity.
V15 supports invisible indexes. Invisible indexes are fully maintained and updated but are not considered by the optimizer for processing queries. This can improve performance for querying tables that are highly dynamic such as staging tables and can be used to test whether an index is actually necessary to efficient performance.
V15 adds the ability to acquire the query plan for a live active query (and some historical queries that have completed) without setting up for it before execution. This can help to diagnose slow production performance.
V15 enhances Informix’s already impressive support for non-English languages and non-Latin alphabets.
V15 includes built-in support for connecting to IBM’s WatsonX Generative AI platform.
V15 supports External Large Objects simplifying the management and use of static Big Data objects such as text documents, sound and video recordings, Web scrapings, etc.
Here’s a link to to the IIUG Tech Talks recording of a session describing the new features:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EcfixvQ_oM&t=1354s
