Welcome
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.
Migrating Informix® database systems
The HCL Informix® Migration Guide describes how to move data manually between databases, servers, and computers.
Migration to and reversion from 15.0.0
High-availability cluster migration
You must coordinate the migration and reversion of all servers that are involved in high-availability clusters. You can use a rolling upgrade in some cases to update servers while the cluster is online, with minimal interruption to client applications. Otherwise, you must schedule cluster downtime to upgrade the servers. A cluster must be offline to reverse an upgrade or revert to an earlier release.
Restoring clusters to a consistent point
You can restore the primary server in a high-availability cluster to a consistent point after a failed upgrade.

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.
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.
- Migrating Informix® database systems
  The HCL Informix® Migration Guide describes how to move data manually between databases, servers, and computers.
  - Overview of migration
  - Migration to and reversion from 15.0.0
    - Preparing for migration to Version 15.0.0
      Before you install the new version of Informix®, you must prepare the database server environment for migration by performing specified pre-migration tasks. If you are also migrating from 32-bit to 64-Bit database servers, you must perform additional tasks.
    - and Upgrading
      The server nodes in your Enterprise Replication (ER) domain can run different versions and fixpack levels. On the other hand, new features might only be available between servers running the new version, and administrative ‘cdr’ commands should be run from the newest version environment.
    - High-availability cluster migration
      You must coordinate the migration and reversion of all servers that are involved in high-availability clusters. You can use a rolling upgrade in some cases to update servers while the cluster is online, with minimal interruption to client applications. Otherwise, you must schedule cluster downtime to upgrade the servers. A cluster must be offline to reverse an upgrade or revert to an earlier release.
      - Preparing to migrate, upgrade, or revert clusters
        If you use high-availability clusters, you must coordinate the migration of all of the servers that are involved in a high-availability cluster, and you must perform additional steps when preparing to migrate.
      - Rolling upgrade of an online cluster to the next fix pack or PID (UNIX, Linux)
        Note that it is not possible to perform a rolling upgrade to version 15.0.0. Consult the following information only if you are upgrading an Informix server to version 14.10 or earlier.
      - Upgrading an offline cluster to a fix pack or PID
        You can bring a high-availability cluster offline to apply any PID or fix pack of the same version of the database server. For example, you must bring the clusters offline to upgrade the servers to the current fix pack if earlier fix packs were not applied to the server. This procedure is an alternative to the rolling upgrade procedure.
      - Migrating an offline cluster to a new major version
        When migrating from Informix 11.70 or a later version to 15.0.0, you stop all servers in the cluster during a period when downtime is acceptable. While the cluster if offline, you upgrade all the servers. You then start the primary followed by the secondary servers. You need not rebuild the cluster or clone the servers.
      - Moving Your Migrated Version 15.0.0 Instance from Compatibility Mode to Native Mode
        To enable all version 15.0.0 features one must move the instance into native mode.
      - Rolling upgrade of an online cluster with Enterprise Replication
        You can perform a rolling upgrade in a high-availability cluster by temporarily converting the primary and secondary servers to stand-alone Enterprise Replication servers. The upgrade occurs without incurring any downtime because Enterprise Replication supports replication between different versions of the server software. You can use this approach to upgrade to a new major version, or to apply fix packs or interim fixes (PIDs).
      - Reverting clusters
        If you have a high-availability cluster, you must complete additional tasks when you revert from the new version of . You must revert only the primary database server.
      - Restoring clusters to a consistent point
        You can restore the primary server in a high-availability cluster to a consistent point after a failed upgrade.
      - Restoring a cluster from a backup archive
        If you backed up the primary server before you migrated or reverted the cluster, you can restore the primary server from the backup archive if migration or reversion fails. After you restore the primary server, you must recreate the other servers in the high-availability cluster.
      - Restoring a cluster from the HDR secondary server
        You can restore the primary server from the High-availability Data Replication (HDR) secondary server that you prepared to use as a backup server before you migrated or reverted the cluster. After you restore the primary server, you must recreate the other servers in the high-availability cluster.
    - Migrating to 15.0.0
      When you migrate to a new version of Informix®, you must complete required migration and post-migration tasks.
    - Reverting from Version 15.0.0
      As long as your Version 15.0.0 instance is running in compatibility mode, you can revert to the version of the database server from which you migrated. When you run the reversion utility, you specify the target server for reversion and then Informix® checks your database. If necessary, Informix might tell you to drop new objects, before automatically converting your data into the target server.
  - Migration of data between database servers
  - Data migration utilities
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.

Restoring clusters to a consistent point

You can restore the primary server in a high-availability cluster to a consistent point after a failed upgrade.

Before you begin

Prerequisites:

Before you began the upgrade, you must have enabled quick reversion, according to information in Configuring for recovery of restore point data in case an upgrade fails.
The server must be offline.

About this task

Procedure

To restore the primary server in a cluster to a consistent point after a failed upgrade:

Run the onrestorept utility according to these instructions.

What to do next

Alternatively, if you backed up your primary server or you prepared for using the RSS or HDR secondary as a backup server before you upgraded and the upgrade fails, you can take other steps to restore the cluster.