Environment variables for DB-Access

As part of the installation and setup process, the system or database administrator sets certain environment variables that enable HCL® Informix® products to work within a particular operating-system environment.

You must have $INFORMIXDIR/bin in your path if you use on a UNIX™ operating system or %INFORMIXDIR%\bin in your path if you use on a Windows™ operating system. Your operating system uses the path to locate the initialization script and the dbaccess executable file.

In a UNIX™ environment, the database server must have the appropriate terminal that is set up from among the terminals that are listed by the INFORMIXTERM environment variable.

uses the terminal definitions in the terminfo directory unless the INFORMIXTERM environment variable is set to the termcap file. If fails to initialize the menus that are based on the INFORMIXTERM setting, tries to use the other setting. For example, if fails to initialize the menus using the terminfo directory, starts the menus using the termcap file.

You can set the following optional environment variables:

DBACCNOIGN

Rolls back an incomplete transaction if you run the LOAD command in menu mode.

DBCENTURY

Sets the appropriate expansion for DATE and DATETIME values that have only a two-digit year, such as 04/15/12.

DBDATE

Specifies the user formats of DATE values.

DBEDIT

Sets the default text editor without changing the default text editor that is associated with the operating-system shell.

For more information about how uses the text editor that you specify as default, see A system editor.

DBFLTMASK

Sets the default floating-point values of data types FLOAT, SMALLFLOAT, and DECIMAL within a 14-character buffer.

The effect of this variable is limited to the display size for numbers.

DELIMIDENT

Causes the database server to interpret double quoted (" ) text as identifiers rather than strings.

IFX_LONGID

Determines whether a client application can handle long identifiers.

If you use the IFX_LONGID environment variable to support SQL identifiers with up to 128 bytes, some error, warning, or other messages of might truncate database object names that include more than 18 bytes in their identifiers. You can avoid this truncation by not declaring names that have more than 18 bytes.

GL_DATETIME

Defines the end-user formats for data values in DATETIME columns. In databases where GL_DATETIME has a nondefault setting, you must also set the USE_DTENV environment variable to 1 for user formats to be applied correctly in some load and unload operations.

Important:

The %F directive implies no default separator between the SECOND and FRACTION fields of DATETIME values. Defining no separator before the %F directive concatenates SECOND and FRACTION values, as in the following example, where GL_DATETIME has this setting:

%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S%F

Below is the end-user display for a DATETIME YEAR TO FRACTION(2) value on August 23, 2013, at exactly 53 seconds after 1:15 PM:

2013-08-23 13:15:5300

Here 5300 represents 53 seconds, concatenated with the FRACTION precision of 2. To display a separator between the integer and fractional parts of the seconds value, your GL_DATETIME setting must include a literal separator character immediately before the %F formatting directive.