In addition to designing and implementing Informix® dimensional databases, you can use tools to create data warehouse applications and optimize your data warehouse queries.
Welcome to the documentation for HCL Informix® 15.0 and related client tools and products.
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.
These topics describe how to install HCL Informix® database servers, client products, and DataBlade® modules.
In addition to administering the database server, you can tune performance, replicate data, and archive data.
You can upgrade to the 15.0 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.
You can use the HCL Informix® implementation of client APIs to develop applications for Informix database servers.
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.
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.
These topics provide information to help you design, implement, and manage dimensional databases, and describes the tools that you can use to create data warehouses and optimize your data warehouse queries.
Informix® Warehouse Accelerator is a product that you use to improve the performance of your warehouse queries.
You can install Informix® Warehouse Accelerator on the same computer as the Informix database server, on a separate computer, or on a cluster (including a high-availability cluster).
You must configure the accelerator server to work with the Informix® database server.
You create an accelerator by connecting the Informix® database server to the accelerator server.
For efficient query processing, the accelerator server must have its own copy of the data. The data is stored in logical collections of related data, or data marts. A data mart specifies the collection of tables that are loaded into an accelerator and the relationships, or references, between these tables.
Before queries can be routed to the accelerator server for processing, you must set the use_dwa session environment variable.
use_dwa
You can use the Informix® Warehouse Accelerator functions and procedures from the command line or in an application to automate administration tasks.
If you revert the HCL Informix® server to an earlier version, you must drop all of the data marts. If you created data mart definitions by using workload analysis, you must drop all of the tables that were created by the probe2Mart() procedure.
If you do not have a default sbspace created in the Informix® database server and you attempt to install Informix Warehouse Accelerator, an error is returned.
Occasionally you want a specific query to access the most current data, which is stored on the database server. You can turn off acceleration temporarily to run the query.
The Informix® Warehouse Accelerator examples use this sample warehouse schema.
The SMI tables provide a way to access probing data in a relational form, which is most convenient for further processing.
Informix® Warehouse Accelerator supports a subset of the locales that HCL Informix supports.
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.
You can use the popular JSON-oriented query language created by MongoDB to interact with data stored in HCL Informix®.
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.
You can use the HCL Informix® implementation of the SQL language to develop applications for Informix database servers.
Several troubleshooting techniques, tools, and resources are available for resolving problems that you encounter in your HCL Informix® database server environment.
