1st day at IIUG conference

This has been a busy day... it started out with a presentation from Jerry Keesee with some funny notes... He showed us that he reads the c.d.i.... Then I decided to try the IDS 11 certification and went straight to the exam... It took me around 1H10, but I managed to get 65 out of 74 questions right... This means I'm now an happy System Administration for IBM Informix Dynamic Server V11.
The morning was already won, but I had the chance to attend an interesting session about external tables, presented by Khaled Bentebal, president of the French user group. Some questions were raised and things got really interesting. External tables are not only flexible, easy to use but also damn fast! They deserve an article...

After lunch I had my own session to present.... I will have to publish a complete post about the same topic, but I can't promise that until the conference is over. After that I check up on Jonathan Leffler and David Desautels sessions about security, auditing and compliance.

By the end of the day we had a very clear presentation from Rob Thomas (you should recognize the name from his letter to the community) followed by General Manager, Information Management Arvind Krishna. Rob talked about the new Informix strategy. He was very clear about what he will do, and what he needs the community to do.

The night ended somehow unexpectedly... A band came on stage and started playing some very cool Rock tracks.... That would be normal. But I was very surprised when I found out they all work for... IBM!!!... They finished with "Whole lotta love" from Led Zeppelin and I can assure that they could have a second career... Someone passing by told me that it would be wonderful if IBM could play so well together as these guys do ;)