Feature configuration

You can configure the database server to support the types of optional functionality that you need.

The following features are often enabled:

Parallel database queries: You can control the resources that the database server uses to perform decision-support queries in parallel. You must balance the requirements of decision-support queries against the requirements of online transaction processing (OLTP) queries. The resources that you must consider include shared memory, threads, temporary table space, and scan bandwidth.
Data replication: Data replication is the process of representing database objects at more than one distinct site.; High-availability cluster configurations consist of a primary server and one or more secondary servers that contain the same data as the primary server. High-availability clusters can provide redundancy, failover, workload balancing, and scalability. You can direct connections from applications to cluster servers with Connection Manager.; Enterprise Replication replicates all or a specified subset of the data between geographically distributed database servers. You can define set of replication servers as a grid to administer and run queries across the servers. You can combine a high-availability cluster and Enterprise Replication on the same database server.
Auditing: If you enabled role separation when you installed the database server, you can audit selected activities. To use database server auditing, you must specify where audit records are stored, how to handle error conditions, and other configuration options. You also might want to change how users are audited if you suspect that they are abusing their access privileges.
Security: You can keep your data secure by preventing unauthorized viewing and altering of data or other database objects. Use network encryption to encrypt data that is transmitted between servers and clients, and between servers. You can use column-level encryption to store sensitive data in an encrypted format. You create secure connections to the database server with authentication and authorization processes. You can encrypt storage spaces. Discretionary access control verifies whether the user who is attempting to perform an operation is granted the required privileges to perform that operation. You can use label-based access control (LBAC) to control who has read access and who has write access to individual rows and columns of data.
Distributed queries: You can use the database server to query and update multiple databases across multiple database servers or within the same database server instance. Informix® uses a two phase commit protocol to ensure that distributed queries are uniformly committed or rolled back across multiple database servers.
Disk mirroring: When you use disk mirroring, the database server writes data to two locations. Mirroring eliminates data loss due to storage device failures. If mirrored data becomes unavailable for any reason, the mirror of the data is available immediately and transparently to users.
Warehousing: You can create data warehouse applications and optimize your data warehouse queries. Informix® Warehouse Accelerator is an in-memory database that boosts performance for analytic queries on operational and historical data. Informix® Warehouse Accelerator uses a columnar, in-memory approach to accelerate complex warehouse and operational queries without application changes or tuning.