Archiving lance tables and indexes

Your lance tables and indexes are stored outside of Informix-managed chunks, in a directory specified by the IFX_LVECTOR_URI configuration parameter. When archiving your Informix instance it is recommended that you manually archive the contents of IFX_LVECTOR_URI. Modifications to lance tables are not recorded in the Informix logical logs.

Therefore these modifications cannot be logically recovered or replicated using IDS. If your Informix instance is part of a grid, you will need to replicate the contents of IFX_LVECTOR_URI to the other nodes through some other mechanism.

Because Informix does not archive or replicate lance tables or indexes, best practice is to store copies of all vectors, vector ids, and metadata in one or more informix tables, then copy that data into your lance tables via the lvector_bulk_sync() UDR. Your Informix tables represent the "source of truth" in case you lose your lance tables or they somehow become out of sync with your informix tables. Lance tables and indexes can be recreated relatively quickly from the source of truth using bulk synchronization.

If you restore your Informix instance from an archive you will need to either separately restore the contents of IFX_LVECTOR_URI or recreate your lance tables using your Informix tables as the source of truth.