IIUG 2010 conference: 3rd and last day

Well, all good things must come to an end, and the 2010 IIUG conference is no exception.
This last day started with a Q&A sessions with some IBM executives and we heard about how they plan to face the challenges ahead. Right after that I skipped the regular sessions and went to one off track session I was anxiously waiting: The Panther session. Kevin Brown talked about all the new stuff and it's really amazing. From small but crucial to big new features we got a clear view of what's coming. Unfortunately everyone present there has to comply with a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) so I can't really talk about it... What I can say is that it's great!!! But, if you didn't have the chance to be there it does not mean you can't find more about it. You just have to join the Panther beta program. Madhuri Ahuja, the Customer Validation Manager will surely welcome you and lead you through the process.

In the afternoon I was present in two sessions. First one, presented by Hyun-Ju Veja, was about the use of SQLTRACE and OAT. Hyun-Ju works in the advanced problem diagnostic (APD) team, and she based her presentation on a real case scenario, which is always great. SQLTRACE is a real powerful and flexible (specially on latest versions) feature and Open Admin Tool (OAT) makes it very easy to use.
The second session was a must... Darin Tracy, also from APD talked about the ins and outs of the checkpoints specifically in a MACH-11 environment... The added benefit was the presence of Madison Pruet, the replication architect in the room, so things got really deep. I would say this was one of the most useful sessions in the conference, and it's always nice when you face the truth: we usually know less than what we think, meaning some things we assume can be wrong.

Not related with today, there are also some other news. First, I'd like to point out that IIUG got a new area in their website. If you go to http://www.iiug.org/opensource you'll see that there's a big movement in the Informix community related to open source. You can find there some new stuff that can allow some of your favorite open source projects to work with your favorite database. Even better, this is clearly not a work done, but instead it's a work in progress. Feel free to participate either by helping, or simply by saying what open source applications you would like to use with Informix. To start with, you can check a beta version of some changes to Hibernate and MediaWiki. Hibernate is used by many people and it was known to have some issues with Informix. Hopefully they're all solved in this fix, and it will be submitted to the project.
MediaWiki needs no explanations besides saying that it's the software that runs Wikipedia.
To end the post I just want to thank all the IIUG board and all the people who worked to get the conference up and running, specially because the current times are not easy times, with all the economical problems etc. We were told that 22 countries were present in the event. USA was big as expected, a lot of people from south America (the Brazilian crew was enough to make a soccer team, and apparently they did :) ), several European countries like Portugal, Spain, UK, Germany, Czech Republic (hope I got this right), one person from Cameroon, others from Russia (speaking of which Tatiana Saltykova got the lead again in Advanced Data Tools Fastest Informix DBA Contest III - congratulations), and one person from Malasya (again, hope I got this right)