You can use the HCL Informix® implementation of client APIs to develop applications for Informix database servers.
These topics describe the Global Language Support (GLS) feature available in HCL® Informix® products.
These topics explain how the GLS feature affects the HCL® Informix® implementation of SQL.
The locale affects the collation of built-in SQL character data types.
The choice of locale can affect the character data types.
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.
The Global Language Support (GLS) feature lets HCL® Informix® products handle different languages, cultural conventions, and code sets for Asian, African, European, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries.
HCL Informix® products establish the client, database, and server locales with information from GLS-related environment variables and from data that is stored in the database.
You must declare names for new database objects (and in some cases, for storage objects, such as dbspaces) when you use data definition language (DDL) statements such as CREATE TABLE, CREATE INDEX, and RENAME COLUMN.
The choice of locale can affect the collating order of NCHAR and NVARCHAR character data types.
The CHAR data type stores character data in a fixed-length field. Data can be a string of single-byte or multibyte letters, numbers, and other characters that are supported by the code set of your database locale.
The VARCHAR data type stores character strings of up to 255 bytes in a variable-length field. Data can consist of letters, numbers, and symbols. CHARACTER VARYING is handled the same as VARCHAR.
The LVARCHAR data type can store character strings of up to 32,739 bytes in a variable-length field. If you specify no maximum size in its declaration, the default upper size limit is 2048 bytes. Data values can include letters, numbers, symbols, white space, and unprintable characters.
The TEXT data type stores any text data. TEXT columns typically store memos, manual chapters, business documents, program source files, and other types of textual information.
The GLS feature allows you to put non-ASCII characters (including multibyte characters) in the elements of an SQL statement.
These topics explain how a locale affects the way that a database server handles the MONEY data type, extended data types, and smart large objects (CLOB and BLOB data types).
The choice of a locale can affect certain SQL data manipulation statements.
HCL Informix® supports a configuration parameter, SQL_LOGICAL_CHAR, whose setting can simplify the use of certain Data Definition Language (DDL) statements of SQL when you declare character data types in locales that support multibyte code sets.
These topics describe how the GLS feature affects the database server.
These topics explain how the GLS feature affects applications that you develop with the HCL Informix® Client Software Development Kit.
These topics explain how the GLS feature affects IBM® Informix® ESQL/C, an SQL application programming interface (API).
This section contains additional reference information.
Starting with CSDK 4.50.xC4, Informix .NET Core Provider built with .NET Core SDK/Runtime v3.1 is shipped for Windows x64 and Linux x86_64 platforms.
These topics include information about HCL Informix®4GL and SQL.
The Actian MCP (Model Context Protocol) server provides a standardized interface to connect Large Language Model (LLM) agents and AI applications directly to your HCL Informix database.
These topics include information about the translated user interface files for Informix® UNIX™ products, locales, and code set conversion tables
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.
In addition to designing and implementing Informix® dimensional databases, you can use tools to create data warehouse applications and optimize your data warehouse queries.
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.
