Home
Administering
In addition to administering the database server, you can tune performance, replicate data, and archive data.
System administration
These topics contain concepts, procedures, and reference information for database and database server administrators to use for managing and tuning HCL Informix® database servers.
Administrator's Guide
The Informix® Administrator's Guide provides the information required to administer HCL Informix.
The database server
Database server initialization
The database server requires both disk-space initialization and shared-memory initialization.
Database server operating modes
You can determine the current database server mode by running the onstat utility from the command line. The onstat header displays the mode.
Users permitted to change modes

Administering
In addition to administering the database server, you can tune performance, replicate data, and archive data.
- System administration
  These topics contain concepts, procedures, and reference information for database and database server administrators to use for managing and tuning HCL Informix® database servers.
  - List of utilities
    HCL Informix® includes utilities and applications that you can use to perform administrative tasks and capture information about configuration and performance.
  - Administrator's Guide
    The Informix® Administrator's Guide provides the information required to administer HCL Informix.
    - The database server
      - Overview of database server configuration and administration
        After you install HCL Informix®, you configure the database server system and start administering the database server.
      - Client/server communication
        These topics explain the concepts and terms that you must understand in order to configure client/server communication.
      - Database server initialization
        The database server requires both disk-space initialization and shared-memory initialization.
        Initialization process
        When you start the database server or initialize disk space, the database server performs a set of steps. You can see the results of each step in the message log.
        Database server operating modes
        You can determine the current database server mode by running the onstat utility from the command line. The onstat header displays the mode.
        Users permitted to change modes
        Changing database server operating modes
        Use the oninit and onmode utilities to change from one database server operating mode to another. Use the ADMIN_MODE_USERS configuration parameter to specify which users can connect to the server in administration mode.
    - Disk, memory, and process management
    - Logging and log administration
    - Fault tolerance
    - High availability and scalability
      A successful production environment requires database systems that are always available, with minimal if any planned outages, and that can be scaled quickly and easily as business requirements change.
    - Distributed data
    - Overview of automatic monitoring and corrective actions
      You can use the SQL administration API, the Scheduler, and drill-down queries to manage automatic maintenance, monitoring, and administrative tasks.
  - Administrator's Reference
    The Informix® Administrator's Reference includes comprehensive descriptions of HCL Informix configuration parameters, the system-monitoring interface (SMI) tables in the sysmaster database, the syntax of database server utilities such as onmode and onstat, logical-log records, disk structures, event alarms, and unnumbered error messages.
  - DB-Access User's Guide
    The Informix® DB-Access User's Guide describes how to use the DB-Access utility to access, modify, and retrieve information from Informix database servers.
  - High-Performance Loader User's Guide
    The describes how to use the HCL Informix® to load and unload large quantities of data efficiently to or from Informix databases.
  - Performance Guide
    The Informix® Performance Guide describes how to configure and operate your HCL Informix database server to improve overall system throughput and to improve the performance of SQL queries.
  - SNMP Subagent Guide
    The describes the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and the software that you need to use SNMP to monitor and manage HCL Informix® database servers and databases.
  - InformixHQ Guide
    InformixHQ is a modern web console for visualizing, monitoring, and managing your Informix server instances. It is purpose built for ease-of-use, scaling out, and optimizing DevOps needs. It provides critical performance management capabilities, monitoring how key performance metrics are changing over time and tracking how efficiently Informix is running your workload even when you’ve stepped away from your screen. Its monitoring system feeds directly into a customizable alerting system so you can be immediately alerted via email, Twilio, or PagerDuty whenever an issue occurs on one of your Informix database server instances. InformixHQ is designed to be scalable to efficiently manage and monitor as many Informix database server instances as you need. Moreover, it's a tool that can be shared by the DBAs, the app developers, the ops engineers, and management and accessed from any desktop, laptop, or mobile device. InformixHQ is the centralized hub for graphical monitoring, alerting, and administration of your Informix database servers.
- Backup and Restore Guide
  The Informix® Backup and Restore Guide describes how to use the Informix ON-Bar and ontape utilities to back up and restore database server data. These utilities enable you to recover your databases after data is lost or becomes corrupted due to hardware or software failure or accident.
- Enterprise Replication
  The HCL® Informix® Enterprise Replication Guide describes the concepts of data replication using Informix Enterprise Replication, including how to design your replication system, as well as administer and manage data replication throughout your enterprise.

Users permitted to change modes

UNIX™ only

Users who are logged in as root or informix and members of the DBSA group can change the operating mode of the database server.

If you want users with the DBSA group to connect to the database server in administration mode, set the ADMIN_USER_MODE_WITH_DBSA configuration parameter to 1. If this parameter is set to zero, then access is restricted to user informix only. If the parameter is missing from $ONCONFIG, it is treated as 0.

User informix or a DBSA can dynamically give one or more specific users the ability to connect to the database server in administration mode, using the onmode utility, the oninit utility, or the ADMIN_MODE_USERS configuration parameter.

Note: For a member of the DBSA group, the permissions on $INFORMIXDIR/bin/oninit must be changed to allow public execute permission - root:informix:6755 in a standard HCL Informix® installation.

Windows™ only

Operating modes shows which users can change the operating mode of the database server in Windows™. Apache as user informix. The Apache server runs as a member of the Informix-Admin group.

Table 1. Changing operating modes in windows
Changing operating mode	Administrators group	Informix®-Admin group
command-line utilities such as starts		X
services control panel	X