Too many subjects...

Yes... Fortunately it's true: I can't keep up with everything that's been hapening....
In this post I'll mix a lot of topics. They've been covered elsewhere, but for the record, a few comments:

• Carlton Doe, a well know name within the Informix community, has published a new book. It's called Administering Informix Dynamic Server: Building the Foundation. You can find it at Amazon. I don't have a copy yet, but I look forward to check on the contents. Given the author's history on Informix and previous work this book should be a safe investment
• IBM has made available an Informix Virtual Appliance. This is essentially a virtual machine pre-configured with a lot of Informix software (IDS of course, Client SDK, JDBC driver, Spatial Datablade, Open Admin Tool, Data Server Drivers - JDBC/ODBC, and finally Data Studio). All running on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2. All you need to run it is a copy of one off the VMWare players. You can get a complete explanation and download instructions on Guy Bowerman's site
• IBM started another initiative. It's called the Data Champion Program. The idea is to publicly recognize individuals who have made strong contributions to the Data Management community. The program website is located at http://www.ibm.com/software/data/champion. Today, Mr. Arvind Krishan announced at IBM Information On Demand 2008 conference (IOD) the inaugural champions.
  I'd like to congratulate all of them, with just one special note to Eric Herber for his wonderful job at Informix Zone ( http://informix-zone.com).
  You can nominate other champions on the program's website above until January 31, 2009.
• Speaking about IOD, the IBM Information On Demand 2008 conference, it started yesterday and you can expect some important news. For now, on the light side, there are a lot of Informix tattooed people there... Take a look at this photo for example, courtesy of Jean George Perrin, showing a familiar face for the Portuguese Informix community, with a "quality stamp on the forehead" :)
  

• One of the IOD news is about SolidDB. As you probably already know, Solid was acquired by IBM, and produces a product called SolidDB that can act as a cache for DB2 and Informix. SolidDB is an in-memory database, meaning it can speed things quite a bit. In this press release, IBM announces that it now supports RDBMS from other vendors. Specifically, SolidDB cache now supports DB2, Informix, Oracle, Sybase and in a near future SQL Server
  
• And finally, an announcement from Exact, about plans to support for Informix in two products: iReplay (capture and replay SQL), and iWatch (SQL monitoring). You can check the press release here: http://www.exact-solutions.com/aboutus/news/386

That's all for now. This post is just to keep you up to date. I'd love to return to long, boring, technical articles, but time is short... Hopefully soon...