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With the general availability - eGA completed 5/24, GA on
6/4 - of the new release 11.70.FC5 of both, the Informix Server and the
Informix Warehouse Accelerator, a set of new functionalities was
implemented for the accelerator:

• Partition Refresh:

  Refresh data quickly without reloading the whole data mart. By using
  the new functions dropPartMart() and loadPartMart(), you
  can drop and load a specific partition of fact tables in an existing
  data mart. With fact tables in the warehouse database fragmented, this
  can save a lot of time when only some fragments of the fact table have
  changed data to be propagated into the data mart.

• Integration with Informix MACH11:

  High-availability secondary servers of an Informix MACH11
  environment can now be used to accelerate queries and to administer
  data marts, including the loading of data marts. Secondary servers are
  perfectly suitable for dealing with the rather static data in data
  marts. By connecting secondary servers to the Informix Warehouse
  Accelerator, you have greater flexibility in a mixed-workload
  environment, leaving primary servers free to exclusively handle OLTP,
  thus increasing the availability and the throughput for all the
  servers in the high-availability cluster.

• Support for more SQL functions implemented:
  
  • LEN, LENGTH : length of a character value.
  • SUBSTR, SUBSTRING : substring of a character value.
  • TODAY : current system date.
  • TRIM : remove specified leading or trailing pad characters from a string.
  • YEAR : four-digit year of a DATE or DATETIME value.
  • UNITS : specify the time unit of a DATE or DATETIME value.

• New options for session environment use_dwa:

  The use_dwa session environment now includes new options for
  controlling accelerator related aspects of client connections to the
  Informix database server. You can now specify settings for a
  particular session, control whether queries are run by the Informix
  database server if they cannot be accelerated by Informix Warehouse
  Accelerator, and specify an output file for debug/trace
  messages.

• Support for the Solaris Intel x64 operating system added:

  Informix Warehouse Accelerator now supports query acceleration for
  Informix database servers that are installed on the Solaris Intel x64
  operating system.

It is important to remember, that the Informix Warehouse Accelerator
must be of the same version as the Informix Server, for which query
acceleration is to be utilized.

In the next few entries of this blog we'll take a closer look at the
details of these new enhancements.

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