In addition to administering the database server, you can tune performance, replicate data, and archive data.
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.
After you design your replication system, you define it and start replication.
The following topics explain the steps that are required for setting up Enterprise Replication.
These topics describe how to prepare your disk for Enterprise Replication.
These topics contain concepts, procedures, and reference information for database and database server administrators to use for managing and tuning HCL Informix® database servers.
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.
Informix® Enterprise Replication generates and manages multiple copies of data at one or more sites, which allows an enterprise to share corporate data throughout its organization.
Before you set up your replication system, plan how to include Enterprise Replication into your database server environment, design your database schema by following Enterprise Replication requirements, and then design your replication system between database servers.
You must prepare the network environment for each database server in an Enterprise Replication domain.
Logical logs must be configured correctly for Enterprise Replication.
If you use the time stamp, time stamp and SPL routine, or delete wins conflict resolution rules, you must provide enough disk space for the delete tables that Enterprise Replication creates to keep track of modified rows for conflict resolution.
If you plan to use shadow columns, make sure to allow additional disk space for their values.
You can create directories for Aborted Transactions Spooling (ATS) and Row Information Spooling (RIS) files instead of using the default directories.
To prepare the database server environment, set database server environment variables and configuration parameters, and synchronize the operating system time on all participating database servers.
You can load data into or unload data out of tables in your replication environment in various ways, depending on your circumstances.
These topics describe the steps defining and starting Enterprise Replication.
A grid is a set of replication servers that are configured to simplify administration. When you run SQL data definition statements from within a grid context on a grid server, the statements propagate to all servers in the grid. You can run SQL data manipulation statements and routines through grid routines. You can choose to set up replication automatically when you create a table through a grid. You can propagate external files to other servers in the grid.
Sharding is a way to horizontally partition a single table across multiple database servers in a shard cluster. Enterprise Replication moves the data from the source server to the appropriate target server as specified by the sharding method. You query a sharded table as if the entire table is on the local server. You do not need to know where the data is. Queries that are performed on one shard server retrieve the relevant data from other servers in a shard cluster. Sharding reduces the index size on each shard server and distributes performance across hardware. You can add shard servers to the shard cluster as your data grows.
You can monitor and diagnose problems with the Enterprise Replication system by using several different methods, depending on your needs.