Data Warehouse by Jack Parker  jparker@epsilon.com

Jack Parker ( not pictured ) of Epsilon Corporation  in Boston, Massachusetts talked about the requirements and procedures of implementing a data warehouse, drawing on his experiences working  on projects such as one with Fleet Bank. .  Among the many points that Jack mentioned  was the importance of having  upper management support for the building of a data warehouse and issues surrounding the import of data into a data warehouse.  Jack is a big fan of Informix's High Performance Loader.   Jack had the misfortune  of demonstrating the enduring value of blackboards.
  

Beginners Guide to Web Enabling your Informix Database (using Perl on NT)  by Peter Schmidt  pschmidt@advancedatatools.com

In this talk , Peter Schmidt discussed how he connected his Informix  database of movie videos  on an NT server to the Web using Perrl and  Informix  - 4GL. His  main point was that such a task is relatively simple , one need know  a programming language  ( in his case 4GL ) , a scripting language  ( eg: Perl )  and a smattering of HTML.    Peter , quite helpfully ,  walked  the audience through his programming code.   He will be providing the talk at the Informix World Wide User's conference in San Diego. One can  find his presentation on the WEB at http://www.erols.com/peterschmidt/slide1/index.htm 

Using Java to Access UDO Features by Shawn Swart  sswart@fugen.com

Shawn gave a clear presentation about the Informix Java Developers' Toolkit..  There were many good questions from the small but involved audience. One can  find his presentation here.
  

SQL Query Optimization  by Kevin Fennimore kfenn@uci-consulting.com

Kevin   discussed  query optimization , indexing strategies and the new features of  Informix 7.3   ( the Oracle like functions of DECODE, CASE and NVL ).  Kevin is quite impressed with  7.3 saying that he has seen quite an improvement with PeopleSoft  correlated subqueries.  One can  find his presentation here.
 

Informix IDS Server Monitoring and Tuning by Lester Knutsen lester@advancedatatools.com

For a large audience  of DBAs, Lester discussed thetools  provided by Informix to monitor an Informix Dynamic Server database Informix provides  two powerfull tools for the task, the Informix Enterprise Command Center and the Relational Object Manger  which contains GUI database tools. Lester also reviewed  the 4 main goals of performance tuning.  Reduce CPU cycles. Reduice disk I/O. Reduce memory requirements and reduce network bandwith. One canuse the IECC to look at the sysmaster databse  , a special Informix database that "peeks" into the shared memory of and IDS database.   Lester has written numerous scripts  which retrieve data out the sysmaster database.  One can  find his presentation here.

Developing Data Blades  by Steve Kelley and Nick Rossopoulos

skelley@umiacs.umd.edu A double-feature with Nick Rossopoulos and Steve Kelley as speakers. Nick gave a summary of R-tree indexing and how it fits into the Cubetree scheme, which is a way of creating dense indexes and thus improving access speeds for data warehouses and very large databases. We had to retire to the lab because connections failed in the classroom. We returned to the classroom for Steve Kelley's straightforward talk on how to create Informix datablades.