Informix Software Inc said its long-awaited OnLine Extended Parallel Server8.1 (OnLine XPS) is now generally available, by which it actually means the end of the month, when it will be up on the Hitachi Data Systems SR4300Scalable RISC Complex, IBM Corp RS/6000, NCR Corp WorldMark 5100, and ICLPlc Goldrush MegaServer. All the other Unix platforms will be available by October, when the company promised there will be 12 in all. It was re-built from the ground-up, based on its Dynamic Scalable Architecture (DSA). The new features are in the areas of transaction and query scalability, decision support query processing, Very Large Database (VLDB) manageability and of course, the web. OnLine XPS 8.1 has a new messaging system, which the company says avoids the overheads that TCP/IP brings. A new transaction management facility provides scalable transaction coordination across SMPand MPP systems, and application partitioning enables applications on aspecific node to execute local SQL state ments, avoiding the need to introduce coordination among nodes. On the decision support front, version8.1 introduces sampled queries that support statistical sampling, so trend analysis queries can be run much faster by running it on only a sample of the database. Ranking gives faster OLAP queries by only delivering thefirst or last N rows requested. Nothing new in that, but Informix claimsother parallel DBMS vendors would do it on a client tool, requiring a lot of data to be processed across the network. And Informix has introduced acase statement to group multiple queries. For VLDB manageability, Informixhas introduced a tool called OnBar for on-line backup and restore of verylarge databases and also supports third-party management products. A high-performance parallel loader is a conversion tool is included for parallel conversion of data types such as EBCDIC to ASCII and it has a programmable interface to integrate with other systems a real-time feeds.And DB Slices enables administrators to logically group together sets of DBSpaces without affecting parallel execution of queries, updates and administration across the underlying platforms, the company claims. And for the web, Informix has bundled Netscape Communications Co rp’s EnterpriseServer software and Navigator Gold. The bundling will enable data to be deployed across intranets, according to Informix. When it’s released on schedule on July 31, OnLine XPS 8.1 will go from $30,000, excluding support and depending on configuration.
