In addition to administering the database server, you can tune performance, replicate data, and archive data.
These topics contain concepts, procedures, and reference information for database and database server administrators to use for managing and tuning HCL Informix® database servers.
These topics describe how to configure and operate your HCL Informix® database server to improve overall system throughput and to improve the performance of SQL queries.
You can test, monitor, and improve 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.
HCL Informix® includes utilities and applications that you can use to perform administrative tasks and capture information about configuration and performance.
These topics provide the information required to administer HCL Informix®.
These topics include comprehensive descriptions of HCL Informix® configuration parameters, the system-monitoring interface (SMI) tables in the sysmaster database, the syntax of database server utilities such as onmode and onstat, logical-log records, disk structures, event alarms, and unnumbered error messages.
This publication describes how to use the DB-Access utility to access, modify, and retrieve information from HCL® Informix® database servers.
These topics describe how to use the HCL Informix® High-Performance Loader (HPL) to load and unload large quantities of data efficiently to or from Informix databases.
Performance measurement and tuning issues and methods are relevant to daily database server administration and query execution.
You can use performance monitoring tools to create a performance history, to monitor database resources at scheduled times, or to monitor ongoing transaction or query performance.
The combination of operating-system and Informix® configuration parameters can affect CPU utilization. You can change the settings of the Informix configuration parameters that directly affect CPU utilization, and you can adjust the settings for different types of workloads.
The combination of operating-system and Informix® configuration parameters can affect memory utilization.
The configuration of your database server affects I/O activity.
Some performance issues are associated with unfragmented tables and table fragments.
Informix® provides several types of indexes. Some performance issues are associated with indexes.
The database server uses locks, which can affect concurrency and performance. You can monitor and administer locks.
One of the most frequent causes of poor performance in relational database systems is contention for data that resides on a single I/O device. Proper fragmentation of high-use tables can significantly reduce I/O contention. These topics discuss the performance considerations that are involved when you use table fragmentation.
These topics describe query plans, explain how the database server manages query optimization, and discuss factors that you can use to influence the query plan. These topics also describe performance considerations for SPL routines, the UDR cache, and triggers.
Optimizer directives are comments that tell the query optimizer how to execute a query. You can use optimizer directives to improve query performance.
You can manage how the database server performs PDQ and you can monitor the resources that the database server uses for PDQ.
You can test a query on a system that does not interfere with production database servers. However, you must be careful, because testing queries on a separate system might distort your tuning decisions.
Before you change a query, display its query plan to determine the kind and amount of resources that the query requires. The query plan shows what parallel scans are used, the maximum number of threads required, and the indexes used.
You can control the amount of information that a query evaluates. The greater the precision with which you specify the desired rows, the greater the likelihood that your queries will complete quickly.
The database server updates statistics automatically according to a predefined schedule and a set of expiration policies. The Auto Update Statistics (AUS) maintenance system identifies tables and indexes that require new optimizer statistics and runs the appropriate UPDATE STATISTICS statements to optimize query performance.
The UPDATE STATISTICS statement updates the statistics in the system catalog tables that the optimizer uses to determine the lowest-cost query plan.
You can often improve the performance of a query by adding or, in some cases, removing indexes. You can also enable the optimizer to automatically fetch a set of keys from an index buffer.
The optimizer assumes that access to a row from a remote database takes longer than access to a row in a local database. The optimizer estimates include the cost of retrieving the row from disk and transmitting it across the network.
You can improve the performance of sequential read operations on large tables by eliminating repeated sequential scans.
You can significantly improve the performance of a query that involves a view by enabling view folding.
After you understand what the query is doing, you can look for ways to obtain the same output with less effort.
You can influence the amount of time that Informix® takes to optimize a query and to return rows to a user.
Queries that access user-defined data types (UDTs) can take advantage of the same performance features that built-in data types use.
Before the database server runs an SQL statement, it must first parse and optimize the statement. Optimizing statements can be time consuming, depending on the size of the SQL statement.
You can monitor the number of active sessions and threads and the amount of resources that they are using. Monitoring sessions and threads is important for sessions that perform queries as well as sessions that perform inserts, updates, and deletes.
You can monitor transactions to track open transactions and the locks that those transactions hold. You can use several onstat utility options to view transaction, lock, and session statistics.
The onperf utility is a windowing environment that you can use to monitor the database server performance. The onperf utility monitors the database server running on the UNIX™ operating system.
These topics describe the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and the software that you need to use SNMP to monitor and manage HCL Informix® database servers and databases.
InformixHQ is a modern web console for visualizing, monitoring, and managing your Informix server instances. It is purpose built for ease-of-use, scaling out, and optimizing DevOps needs. It provides critical performance management capabilities, monitoring how key performance metrics are changing over time and tracking how efficiently Informix is running your workload even when you’ve stepped away from your screen. Its monitoring system feeds directly into a customizable alerting system so you can be immediately alerted via email, Twilio, or PagerDuty whenever an issue occurs on one of your Informix database server instances. InformixHQ is designed to be scalable to efficiently manage and monitor as many Informix database server instances as you need. Moreover, it's a tool that can be shared by the DBAs, the app developers, the ops engineers, and management and accessed from any desktop, laptop, or mobile device. InformixHQ is the centralized hub for graphical monitoring, alerting, and administration of your Informix database servers.
These topics describe how to use the HCL® Informix® ON-Bar and ontape utilities to back up and restore database server data. These utilities enable you to recover your databases after data is lost or becomes corrupted due to hardware or software failure or accident.
These topics describe the concepts of data replication using HCL Informix® Enterprise Replication, including how to design your replication system, as well as administer and manage data replication throughout your enterprise.
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.
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.
