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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.
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.
Cluster administration
Performing basic administration tasks
Monitor HDR status
Command-line utilities

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
    - 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.
      - Strategies for high availability and scalability
        HCL Informix® database software can be customized to create the appropriate high availability and scalability solution to match your business goals and environment.
      - High-availability cluster configuration
      - Cluster administration
        How data replication works
        Performing basic administration tasks
        Changing the configuration parameters for an HDR replication pair
        Back up storage spaces and logical-log files
        When you use HDR, you must back up logical-log files and storage spaces only on the primary database server. Be prepared, however, to perform storage-space and logical-log backups on the secondary database server in case the type of the database server is changed to standard.
        Changing the logging mode of databases
        Add and drop chunks and storage spaces
        Renaming chunks
        Saving chunk status on the secondary database server
        For high-availability cluster servers, if the status of a chunk (down or online) is changed on the secondary database server, and that secondary server is restarted before a checkpoint is completed, the updated chunk status is not saved.
        Use and change mirroring of chunks
        Manage the physical log
        Manage the logical log
        Manage virtual processors
        Manage shared memory
        Configure SMX connections
        Server Multiplexer Group (SMX) is a communications interface that supports encrypted multiplexed network connections between servers in high availability environments. SMX provides a reliable, secure, high-performance communication mechanism between database server instances.
        Replicate an index to an HDR secondary database server
        Encrypting data traffic between HDR database servers
        Adjust LRU flushing and automatic tuning in HDR server pairs
        Cloning a primary server
        You can use the ifxclone utility to perform one-step server instantiation, allowing a primary server in a high-availability cluster to be cloned with minimum setup or configuration.
        Database updates on secondary servers
        You can enable applications connected to secondary servers to update database data. If you enable write operations on a secondary server, DELETE, INSERT, MERGE, and UPDATE operations are propagated to the primary server.
        Backup and restore with high-availability clusters
        You cannot perform most backup and restore operations on secondary servers.
        Change the database server mode
        If you change the mode of a database server in a high-availability cluster, replication stops.
        Changing the database server type
        You can change the type of either the primary or the secondary database server.
        Prevent blocking checkpoints on HDR servers
        Monitor HDR status
        Command-line utilities
        The onstat -g dri option
        The oncheck -pr option
        SMI tables
        The sysdri table provides information about the High-Availability Data-Replication status of the database server.
        Obtain RS secondary server statistics
        Remove an RS secondary server
        RS secondary server security
        Transaction completion during cluster failover
        You can configure servers in a high-availability cluster environment to continue processing transactions after failover of the primary server.
      - Connection management through the Connection Manager
        Connection Managers can control automatic failover for high-availability clusters, monitor client connections and direct requests to appropriate database servers, act as proxy servers and handle client/server communication, and prioritize connections between application servers and the primary server of a high-availability cluster. Connection Managers support high-availability clusters, replicate sets, server sets, and grids.
      - Cluster failover, redirection, and restoration
        To maintain availability, you must plan for the failover of primary servers, redirecting client connections from unavailable servers, and restoring the cluster to its original configuration after a failure.
    - 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 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 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.

Command-line utilities

The header information displayed every time you run onstat has a field to indicate if a database server is operating as a primary or secondary database server.

The following example shows a header for a database server that is the primary database server in a replication pair, and in online mode:

HCL Informix Dynamic Server Version 11.50.UC1   -- online(Prim) -- Up 45:08:57

This example shows a database server that is the secondary database server in a replication pair, and in read-only mode.

HCL Informix Dynamic Server Version 11.50.UC1     -- Read-Only (Sec) -- Up 45:08:57

The following example shows a header for a database server that is not involved in HDR. The type for this database server is standard.

HCL Informix Dynamic Server Version 11.50.UC1     -- online -- Up 20:10:57

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