Welcome
Migrating and upgrading
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.
Migrating Informix® database systems
These topics describe how to migrate to a new version of HCL Informix® and how to revert to the database server that you migrated from. These topics also describe how to move data manually between databases, servers, and computers.
Migration to and reversion from 15.0
Migrating to Informix® 15.0
When you migrate to a new version of Informix®, you must complete required migration and post-migration tasks.
Completing required post-migration tasks
After you migrate, you must complete a series of post-migration tasks to prepare the new version of the server for use.
Update statistics on some system catalog tables after migrating
After migrating successfully to Informix® Version 15.0, run UPDATE STATISTICS on some of the system catalog tables in your databases.

HCL Informix® V15.0 documentation
Welcome to the documentation for HCL Informix® 15.0 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 DataBlade® 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 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
  These topics describe how to migrate to a new version of HCL Informix® and how to revert to the database server that you migrated from. These topics also describe how to move data manually between databases, servers, and computers.
  - Overview of migration
  - Migration to and reversion from 15.0
    - Preparing for migration to Version 15.0
      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.
    - Enterprise Replication 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.
    - Migrating to Informix® 15.0
      When you migrate to a new version of Informix®, you must complete required migration and post-migration tasks.
      - Migrating to the new version of Informix®
        After you prepare your databases for migration, you can migrate to the new version of Informix®.
      - Completing required post-migration tasks
        After you migrate, you must complete a series of post-migration tasks to prepare the new version of the server for use.
        For ON-Bar, copy the sm_versions file
        After migration, if you plan to use a storage manager other than the HCL Informix® Primary Storage Manager, copy your previous sm_versions file to use with ON-Bar. Informix Primary Storage Manager does not use the sm_versions file.After migration, copy your previous sm_versions file for the ON-Bar backup and restore system to run.
        Finish preparing earlier versions of 12.10 databases for JSON compatibility
        To make databases that were created with earlier versions of Informix® 12.10 JSON compatible, you must complete some post-migration steps.
        Optionally update statistics on your tables after migrating
        Optionally run UPDATE STATISTICS on your tables and on UDRs that perform queries, if you have performance problems after migrating to the new version of Informix®.
        Update statistics on some system catalog tables after migrating
        After migrating successfully to Informix® Version 15.0, run UPDATE STATISTICS on some of the system catalog tables in your databases.
        Review client applications
        After you migrate a database server on the same operating system or move the database server to another compatible computer, review the client applications to take necessary actions related to migration. If necessary, recompile or modify client applications.
        Verify the integrity of migrated data
        Open each database with DB-Access and use oncheck to verify that data was not corrupted during the migration process.
        Back up Informix® after migrating to the new version
        Use a backup and restore tool (ON-Bar or ontape) to make a level-0 backup of the new database server. Do not overwrite the tapes that contain the final backup of the old database server.
        Tune the new version for performance and adjust queries
        After backing up the new server, you can tune the database server to maximize performance. If your queries are slower after the upgrade, there are steps you can take to adjust your configuration and queries.
        Register DataBlade® modules
        You must register any DataBlade® modules that you installed.
    - Reverting from Informix® Version 15.0
      As long as your Version 15.0 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 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.
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.

Update statistics on some system catalog tables after migrating

After migrating successfully to Informix® Version 15.0, run UPDATE STATISTICS on some of the system catalog tables in your databases.

If you are migration from a Version 7.31 or 7.24 database server or moving data from that version to the current version, be sure to run UPDATE STATISTICS on the following system catalog tables in Informix® Version 15.0:

sysblobs system catalog table
syscolauth system catalog table
syscolumns system catalog table
sysconstraints system catalog table
sysdefaults system catalog table
sysdistrib system catalog table
sysfragauth system catalog table
sysfragments system catalog table
sysindices system catalog table
sysobjstate system catalog table
sysopclstr system catalog table
sysprocauth system catalog table
sysproceduressysroleauth system catalog table
syssynonyms system catalog table
syssyntable system catalog table
systabauth system catalog table
systables system catalog table
systriggers system catalog table
sysusers system catalog table

Because you cannot migrate directly from a Version 7.31 or 7.24 database server to Version 15.0, use the dbexport and dbimport utilities or distributed SQL to move your data into the new database server.