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.
Logging and log administration
Logical log
Size of the logical-log file
Performance considerations

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
    - Disk, memory, and process management
    - Logging and log administration
      - Logging
      - Manage the database-logging mode
        You can monitor and modify the database-logging mode.
      - Logical log
        What is the logical log?
        Location of logical-log files
        When the database server initializes disk space, it places the logical-log files and the physical log in the root dbspace.
        Identification of logical-log files
        Status flags of logical-log files
        Size of the logical-log file
        Number of logical-log files
        Performance considerations
        Dynamic log allocation
        Freeing of logical-log files
        Log blobspaces and simple large objects
        Log sbspaces and smart large objects
        Logging process
      - Manage logical-log files
      - Physical logging, checkpoints, and fast recovery
      - Manage the physical log
    - 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.

Performance considerations

For a given level of system activity, the less logical-log disk space that you allocate, the sooner that logical-log space fills up, and the greater the likelihood that user activity is blocked due to backups and checkpoints. Tune the logical-log size to find the optimum value for your system.

Logical-log backups
When the logical-log files fill, you must back them up. The backup process can hinder transaction processing that involves data located on the same disk as the logical-log files. Put the physical log, logical logs, and user data on separate disks. (See the Informix® Backup and Restore Guide.)
Size of the logical log
A smaller logical log fills faster than a larger logical log. You can add a larger logical-log file, as explained in Adding logical-log files manually.
Size of individual logical-log records
The sizes of the logical-log records vary, depending on both the processing operation and the database server environment. In general, the longer the data rows, the larger the logical-log records. The logical log contains images of rows that have been inserted, updated, or deleted. Updates can use up to twice as much space as inserts and deletes because they might contain both before-images and after-images. (Inserts store only the after-image and deletes store only the before-image.)
Number of logical-log records
The more logical-log records written to the logical log, the faster it fills. Databases with transaction logging fill the logical log faster than transactions against databases without transaction logging.
Type of log buffering
Databases that use unbuffered transaction logging fill the logical log faster than databases that use buffered transaction logging.
Enterprise Replication on a table
Because Enterprise Replication generates before-images and after-images of the replicated tables, it might cause the logical log to fill.
Frequency of rollbacks
More rollbacks fill the logical log faster. The rollbacks themselves require logical-log file space although the rollback records are small.
Number of smart large objects
Smart large objects that have user data logging enabled and have a large volume of user data updates can fill logical logs at a prodigious rate. Use temporary smart large objects if you do not want to log the metadata.