Welcome
Administering
In addition to administering the database server, you can tune performance, replicate data, and archive data.
Backup and Restore Guide
The HCL® Informix® Backup and Restore Guide describes how to use the HCL Informix 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.
ON-Bar backup and restore system
External backup and restore
External backup and restore overview
An external backup and restore eliminates the downtime of systems because the backup and restore operations are performed external to the HCL® Informix® system.
Prepare for an external backup
Track an external backup

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 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.
- Backup and Restore Guide
  The HCL® Informix® Backup and Restore Guide describes how to use the HCL Informix 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.
  - Overview of backup and restore
    These topics provide an overview of backup and restore concepts. They also provide information about planning for backup and restore operations.
  - ON-Bar backup and restore system
    - Overview of the ON-Bar backup and restore system
      consists of various components and it works with a storage manager to back up and restore data.
    - Configure the storage manager and ON-Bar
      The topics in this section provide the information that you need to plan and to set up with a storage manager.
    - Back up with ON-Bar
      You can use the utility to back up and verify storage spaces (dbspaces, blobspaces, and sbspaces) and logical-log files.
    - Restore data with ON-Bar
      You can use the ON-Bar utility to restore data that was backed up by the ON-Bar utility.
    - External backup and restore
      - External backup and restore overview
        An external backup and restore eliminates the downtime of systems because the backup and restore operations are performed external to the HCL® Informix® system.
        Block before backing up
        Before you begin an external backup, block the database server. Blocking forces a checkpoint, flushes buffers to disk, and blocks user transactions that involve temporary tables.
        Rules for an external backup
        Prepare for an external backup
        Block and unblock database server
        Track an external backup
        Performing an external backup when chunks are not mirrored
      - RS secondary server external backup
        You can perform an external backup of an RS secondary server. Performing a backup of an RS secondary server blocks that RS secondary server, but does not block the primary server.
      - Data restored in an external restore
      - Performing an external restore
      - Initializing HDR with an external backup and restore
    - Customize and maintain ON-Bar
    - ON-Bar catalog tables
      These topics describe the tables that are stored in the sysutils database.
    - ON-Bar messages and return codes
      prints informational, progress, warning, and error messages to the activity log file. return codes indicate the status of the command.
  - ontape backup and restore system
  - Backup and restore a Remote Secondary Server(RSS)
  - Integrated Backup Encryption
    These topics provide information about Integrated Backup Encryption.
  - HCL Informix® Primary Storage Manager
    HCL Informix® Primary Storage Manager is an application that manages storage devices used for backup and restore requests that are issued by . This storage manager supports both serial and parallel processing for backup and restore requests.
  - archecker table level restore utility
  - Backup and restore configuration parameter reference
  - Cloud Backup
    These topics provide information about storing and retrieving the backups directly to the ecosystem of selected cloud providers, namely Amazon S3 and Softlayer Object Storage.
  - Appendixes
- Enterprise Replication
  The describes 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.
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 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.

Track an external backup

The database server and do not track external backups. To track the external backup data, use a third-party storage manager or track the data manually.

The following table shows which items we recommend that you track in an external backup. keeps a limited history of external restores.

Table 1. Items to track when you use external backup and restore
Items to track	Examples
Full path names of each chunk file for each backed up storage space	/work/dbspaces/rootdbs (UNIX™) c:\work\dbspaces\rootdbs (Windows™)
Object type	Critical dbspaces, noncritical storage spaces
ins_copyid_hi and ins_copyid_lo	Copy ID that the storage manager assigns to each backup object
Backup date and time	The times that the database server was blocked and unblocked
Backup media	Tape volume number or disk path name
Database server version	The database server version from which the backup was taken.