For anyone following the Data Studio Developer announcement which I covered recently, here are some additional resources...



A 4-part video guide has been added to Channel DB2 called:
What’s New in Data Studio Developer 2.1 Series.

Eric Herber has written a new IDS book in German called Informix 11.5
as part of the Entwickler Press Schnell+Kompakt series.

With the year coming to an end, this is a good time to look at 2008.

2008 has been a good year for Informix with the release of IDS 11.50 and continued success in the sales of IDS.

I'd like to thank everyone for supporting the Informix products and IDS in particular. I also want to thank all of you for reading my blog.

Some more details are emerging about the Informix Tech Day in Strasbourg. Here is the announcement in English (mostly)..

We are very pleased to announce the first pan-European InformixTechDay!



This is going to be a one-day technical training event. Classes will have both beginner level and more advanced levels. Speakers will cover theory (database theory, architecture) and real field experience.



We hope to have French, English and German speakers and hope to have 3 tracks (one in each language).

A lot of people will have some time off in the next few weeks. Maybe it's a good time to relax and read something that is not directly related to our day to day work. Here is a suggestion for easy and fun reading:

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Richard P. Feynman

ISBN 0-7382-0349-1

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning physicist that has had an interesting live. If you have never heard of him, you should read this set of short stories. It is fun and motivating. Just what's needed to relax during a vacation.

Till next time

Version 2.1 of the free DataStudio Developer was announced earlier this month, and some useful Informix specific feature enhancements are included the new release.



New Informix related features include, among other things:

• Support for running UPDATE STATISTICS for databases, tables and columns.









• Viewing stat
  

I want to point out to all of you an interesting video, which I will use as a basis to talk about an Informix extension that could find some application in MMORPGs. Check out this link (it’s a video):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7632521.stm

Lenexa is a good place to have an Informix tech day, what with all developers and support engineers that hang around the place.

A series of IDS 11.5 technical workshops for business partners is taking place in Europe and Asia in the new year.

Fernando Nunes (see his blog at http://informix-technology.blogspot.com) send me a note on my last blog entry. He said to look at the dbinfo function to solve this problem. Spokey Wheeler basically said the same thing (see his blog at
http://www.informix-zone.com/blog/593).

Fernando mentioned that there is dbinfo('utc_to_datetime', ...) that provides the same translation I did in the SPL code. The thing is that it does not provide quite the same translation. The difference is that it looks at the system timezone and takes it into consideration in the conversion.