IBM Informix at Mobile Data Management conference in Kansas City

IBM Informix academic initiative program is one of the sponsors for Mobile Data Mgmt 2010 conference being held in Kansas City.

At the conference we had an opportunity to present to over a dozen members of academia and industry. We talked about IBM cloud offerings, IBM academic initiative along with various IBM solutions for mobile platforms. We also presented the Informix in Box program to the academic community. We showed them how to access various resources such as training materials, software and more from IBM academic initiative website. We also had opportunity to talk to several faculty members and tell them about Informix in Box program. See the conference page above for abstract of our talk.

Rochester Institute of Technology gets a visit

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) welcomed Informix as Mark Ashworth and Pamela Siebert gave another three-hour workshop to its surprising mix of students - spanning from many departments in computing: Information Technology, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Networking Security, and Applied Computing. Not only that but there were also a mix of both deaf and hearing students. RIT is well known for its superior support and program for the deaf and hard of hearing students.

RIT Informix on Campus coordinator Mark Wambach poses with Pamela Siebert. Mark was her tutor when she was a student at RIT back then!



There were over thirty students and faculty members in attendance, and we introduced Informix to them, talking about its architecture, features, and most especially on blades. Hands on labs were provided on both the introduction and the blades.

We also talked about OpenAdminTool, a PHP-based Web browser administration tool for managing one or more Informix Dynamic Servers. It allows the users to monitor and administrate their IDS instances from a single location - especially from the mobile phone.

The session was very well-received and everyone especially enjoyed the pizza, t-shirts, dvds, and certificate of completion.

Please contact us at idsoncampus at us.ibm.com if you are interested in us visiting your college!

Visit at St. John Fisher College

Informix on Campus visited St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York back in April. We provided a three-hour workshop on introduction to Informix and talked about blades. Mark Ashworth, our Informix Extensibility Architect showed enthusiasm when presenting on blades. Pamela Siebert, a software test engineer, introduced Informix and talked about the demos.

The Grid Slicer demo was introduced to show some of the strengths of Informix. This demo allows users to extract 2D slices from a 3D gridded 1.6GB sample from a male dataset of the Visible Human project of the US National Library of Medicine.

We also talked about how Informix is part of the soccer game - it helps IMPIRE to generate and feed soccer statistics for the major German TV broadcasting, real-time.



The hands-on lab activity was also conducted to get the students familiar with Informix.

Overall, it was a success and Informix presence was made known to the Computer Science Department.

St John Fisher college

The next Informix in a Box seminar will be held at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.

Affiliation:
St. John Fisher College
Computer Science Program

Date/Time:
Wednesday, April 7^th 2010 from 10:00am – 1:00pm

Location:
Pioch 108 (also known as the “Security Lab”)

We will be providing an introductory Informix workshop including hands-on lab activities.

Comment here or email us if you are interested for your college or if you want to join in!

First conference in France based on the INFORMIX ON CAMPUS program

I m pleased to share with all of you my first feedback on our first Conference based on INFORMIX ON CAMPUS in a french school called EISTI.
I spent three hours to explain OAT, indexes and the job of DBA to approximatly 50 students.
If any of you heard one need coming from French University/ Schools, I will be glad to help.

In details, I did :
1)Explanations on the INFORMIX ON CAMPUS program,
2)Open Admin Tool : what is it, screen shots, usage for a DBA,
3)Indexes : what is IDS specific (based on the PPT of the program)
4)Feedbacks on tuning reports
5)DBA : role, fun and easy with IDS (not too, just a little bit)

I only had one session from students. What is the % size on the market place of DBMS ?
I won't share my answer in this Blog.

Informix makes a presence in Milwaukee

Hello! I attended the SIGCSE '10 conference in Milwaukee on March 9 - 13. SIGCSE is geared toward education in computer science.

IBM was a gold level sponsor there, so IBM had its own booth at the expo! So many teachers came to meet us to learn about IBM Academic Initiative in general, also about our "Informix in a Box" program.

Li-Te Cheng, Jeff Gibbs, Jeff Brody, Sharon McFadden (not pictured), and I shared booth duty.

IBM also held a sponsor session on two topics:

• "Lessons From Teaching Teamwork with Rational Team Concert" (Jean-Michel Lemieux and Tim Klinger)
• "Software for a Cause - A Discussion About Student Projects for Organizations in Need" (Li-Te Cheng)
  

If you are interested for more information on the above topics, feel free to contact us and we will point you to the correct place.

Overall, I think Informix has made a nice presence at the conference booth with many teachers and several students stopping by. Our Informix shirts and DVDs were so hot, we ran out of them in under than 2 hours! All we have left was this:


I hope to start seeing random people wearing Informix on Campus shirts soon :)

Keep an eye out for upcoming college trips!

Informix visits UMKC!

Going to the UMKC campus was a refreshing and reinvigorating experience - it brought back memories of the fun days of our college life, especially relating to *some* students dozing during a lecture :)

Albeit technical, my portion of the talk was on the 'cool' features of IDS, touching upon fragmentation, concurrency, recovery, and extensibility features, most of which were at some point, a distinction for IDS when compared with our competitors. I talked, for a major portion, about the extensibility features like SPL, UDRs, VTI/VII, R-Tree, and a sampling of some interesting blades we have and what you could do with them.

Talking about IDS with our loyal customer base, who have a personal bond with Informix, is always interesting because of the varied forms of usage you learn about the product - may it be the always-on OLTP instances of our retail customers, or admin-free setups of Fonterra, or least-cost unmanned setups of Konkan railway. But, talking about IDS with students and faculty on the other end of the spectrum, who knew little about Informix, was interesting too, because you open up the same product to even more varied usages.

Hovering over their heads during the IDS demo in their lab that lasted for an hour following the hour-long technical talk, I was sensing that there was more interest in the hands-on working with IDS than just listening to what it offers. Pradeep Natarajan did a good job delivering the demo, highlighting the content of the demo DVD containing a Virtual Appliance of IDS among other things, then moving on to administering IDS with the feature-rich tools like onstat, onmode, dbaccess and finally flashing them with the capabilities of OAT being able to do most of the traditional terminal-based work from a web browser! Inevitable questions about how and why things are different in IDS from other vendors were even more desirable because it gave you a chance to brag about IDS. In addition to the sheer fun of working with IDS, the free DVD, the free T-shirt and a certificate acknowledging their participation, the knowledge that this information will help them tomorrow, not just for the next course to be taught in UMKC with Informix as one of the options for doing their projects, but also hopefully in their job, was the main factor in keeping the students glued to their seats during the demo.

Signing off my first blog entry...
Uday Kale.