In addition to designing and implementing Informix® dimensional databases, you can use tools to create data warehouse applications and optimize your data warehouse queries.
The Informix® Warehouse Accelerator Administration Guide includes information about installing and configuring the accelerator server, creating data marts, accelerators, and accelerated query tables (AQTs).
The Informix® Data Warehouse Guide provides information to help you design, implement, and manage dimensional databases, and describes the tools that you can use to create data warehouses and optimize your data warehouse queries.
Informix® Warehouse Accelerator is a product that you use to improve the performance of your warehouse queries.
You can install Informix® Warehouse Accelerator on the same computer as the Informix database server, on a separate computer, or on a cluster (including a high-availability cluster).
You must configure the accelerator server to work with the Informix® database server.
You create an accelerator by connecting the Informix® database server to the accelerator server.
For efficient query processing, the accelerator server must have its own copy of the data. The data is stored in logical collections of related data, or data marts. A data mart specifies the collection of tables that are loaded into an accelerator and the relationships, or references, between these tables.
Before queries can be routed to the accelerator server for processing, you must set the use_dwa session environment variable.
use_dwa
You can use the Informix® Warehouse Accelerator functions and procedures from the command line or in an application to automate administration tasks.
If you do not have a default sbspace created in the Informix® database server and you attempt to install Informix Warehouse Accelerator, an error is returned.
Occasionally you want a specific query to access the most current data, which is stored on the database server. You can turn off acceleration temporarily to run the query.
The Informix® Warehouse Accelerator examples use this sample warehouse schema.
The SMI tables provide a way to access probing data in a relational form, which is most convenient for further processing.