Welcome
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
These topics provide the information required to administer HCL Informix®.
The database server
Client/server communication
These topics explain the concepts and terms that you must understand in order to configure client/server communication.
Connectivity files
The connectivity files contain the information that enables client/server communication and enable a database server to communicate with another database server.
Network-configuration files
These topics identify and explain the use of network-configuration files on TCP/IP networks.
TCP/IP connectivity files
When you configure the database server to use the TCP/IP network protocol, you use information from the hosts and services files to prepare the sqlhosts information.
TCP/IP connectivity files (UNIX™)
The hosts and services files are in the /etc directory.

HCL Informix® V15.0.0 documentation
Welcome to the documentation for HCL Informix® 15.0.0 and related client tools and products.
Product overview
HCL Informix® is a fast and scalable database server that manages traditional relational, object-relational, and dimensional databases. Its small footprint and self-managing capabilities are suited to embedded data-management solutions.
Installing
These topics describe how to install HCL Informix® database servers, client products, and DataBlade® modules.
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
    These topics provide 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.
        Client/server architecture
        HCL® Informix® products conform to the client/server software-design model.
        Connections that the database server supports
        The database server supports different types of connections with client application.
        Local connections
        A local connection is a connection between a client and the database server on the same computer.
        Communication support services
        Communication support services include connectivity-related services
        Connectivity files
        The connectivity files contain the information that enables client/server communication and enable a database server to communicate with another database server.
        Network-configuration files
        These topics identify and explain the use of network-configuration files on TCP/IP networks.
        TCP/IP connectivity files
        When you configure the database server to use the TCP/IP network protocol, you use information from the hosts and services files to prepare the sqlhosts information.
        TCP/IP connectivity files (UNIX™)
        The hosts and services files are in the /etc directory.
        TCP/IP connectivity files (Windows™)
        The hosts and services network-configuration files prepare the SQLHOSTS registry key for the TCP/IP network protocol.
        Client and server actions when a TCP/IP connection is opened
        When a TCP/IP connection is opened, information is read on both the client side and server side.
        Multiple TCP/IP ports
        You can modify the services file to take advantage of having multiple Ethernet cards.
        Network security files
        HCL® Informix® products follow standard security procedures that are governed by information contained in the network security files.
        The sqlhosts file and the SQLHOSTS registry key
        HCL® Informix® client/server connectivity information, the sqlhosts information, contains information that enables a client application to find and connect to any HCL Informix database server on the network.
        The sqlhosts information
        The sqlhosts information contains connectivity information for each database server and definitions for groups. The database server looks up the connectivity information when you start the database server, when a client application connects to a database server, or when a database server connects to another database server.
        Informix® support for IPv6 addresses
        On all platforms, HCL Informix® recognizes Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) addresses, which are 128 bits long, and Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses, which are 32 bits long.
        Configuration parameters related to connectivity
        Some of the configuration parameters in the onconfig file specify information related to connectivity.
        Environment variables for network connections
        The INFORMIXCONTIME (connect time) and INFORMIXCONRETRY (connect retry) environment variables affect the behavior of the client when it is trying to connect to a database server. Use these environment variables to minimize connection errors caused by busy network traffic.
        Automatically terminating idle connections
        You can automatically terminate sessions with clients that have been idle for a specified time by enabling the idle_user_timeout Scheduler task.
        Distributed Relational Database Architecture™ (DRDA®) communications
        DRDA is a set of protocols that enables multiple database systems and application programs to work together.
        Examples of client/server configurations
        The next several sections show the correct sqlhosts entries for several client/server connections.
        HCL Informix® MaxConnect
        HCL Informix® MaxConnect is a networking product for HCL® Informix database server environments on UNIX™. Informix MaxConnect manages large numbers (from several hundred to tens of thousands) of client/server connections.
      - Database server initialization
        The database server requires both disk-space initialization and shared-memory initialization.
    - 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.
    - HCL Informix® server licensing
  - Administrator's Reference
    These topics include 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
    This publication describes how to use the DB-Access utility to access, modify, and retrieve information from HCL® Informix® database servers.
  - High-Performance Loader User's Guide
    These topics describe how to use the HCL Informix® High-Performance Loader (HPL) to load and unload large quantities of data efficiently to or from Informix databases.
  - Performance Guide
    These topics describe 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
    These topics describe 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
  These topics describe how to use the HCL® 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
  These topics describe the concepts of data replication using HCL Informix® Enterprise Replication, including how to design your replication system, as well as administer and manage data replication throughout your enterprise.
Migrating and upgrading
You can upgrade to the 15.0.0 release of HCL Informix® or migrate from other database servers to Informix. Upgrading is an in-place migration method that uses your existing hardware and operating system software. Some changes to the Informix database server can affect upgrading from a previous release. The resources that are external to the information center are marked as such.
Client APIs and tools
You can use the HCL Informix® implementation of client APIs to develop applications for Informix database servers.
Embedding Informix®
When you embed HCL Informix®, you can use enterprise-class high-availability and high performance with embeddability features such as easy programmability, a small disk and memory footprint, and silent deployment.
Extending Informix®
Beyond standard relational database objects, HCL Informix® can be extended to handle specialized data types, access methods, routines, and other objects. Informix includes many built-in extensions that are fully integrated in the database server. Informix also provides DataBlade® modules, which are packages of extended database objects for a particular purpose and that are installed separately from the database server. Alternatively, you can create your own user-defined objects for Informix.
Data warehousing
In addition to designing and implementing Informix® dimensional databases, you can use tools to create data warehouse applications and optimize your data warehouse queries.
Designing databases
The first step in creating a relational database is to construct a data model, which is a precise, complete definition of the data you want to store. After you prepare your data model, you must implement it as a database and tables. To implement your data model, you first select a data type for each column and then you create a database and tables and populate the tables with data. You can also implement fragmentation strategies and control access to your data.
JSON compatibility
You can use the popular JSON-oriented query language created by MongoDB to interact with data stored in HCL Informix®.
Security
You can secure your Informix® database server and the data that is stored in your Informix databases. You can encrypt data, secure connections, control user privileges and access, and audit data security.
SQL programming
You can use the HCL Informix® implementation of the SQL language to develop applications for Informix database servers.
Troubleshooting HCL Informix®
Several troubleshooting techniques, tools, and resources are available for resolving problems that you encounter in your HCL Informix® database server environment.
Informix PDF guides

TCP/IP connectivity files (UNIX™)

The hosts and services files are in the /etc directory.

Connectivity files must be available to each computer that runs an HCL® Informix® client/server product.

On systems that use NIS, the hosts and services files are maintained on the NIS server. The hosts and services files that are on your local computer might not be used and might not be up to date. To view the contents of the NIS files, enter the following commands on the command line:

ypcat hosts 
ypcat services