Server Studio™ & Sentinel™ — the premiere suite of integrated system management tools for IBM Informix® data servers — has been updated! The new AGS Release 10 of this industry-leading multi-platform graphical development and management environment provides DBAs and developers with an even richer collection of easy-to-use, proven tools to manage complexities of the Informix data servers’ infrastructure — from initial design and development, all the way through to production deployment and successful operational service. This article will visually explain the features, benefits and usage of AGS Release 10.

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Abstract

Most modern Linux distributions install a journaling file system, i.e., a file system that keeps track of changes, by default. While providing excellent recovery for standard file types on the disk, such journaling can be significantly detrimental for a database server. Raw devices are becoming obsolete on many distributions, as DIRECT_IO can give comparable performance. Choosing the right file filesystem and appropriate features is an important decision for a database server administrator, getting this right from the start can prevent headaches further down the line. Read on to learn more about a journaling file system:

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Abstract

You may experience problems with some applications such as Sage Line 500 running on Informix Dynamic Server with High Availability Data Replication (HDR). When running period end or maintenance programs that recreate tables after purging some of the contents, the table may not immediately be available afterwards, creating locked tables and causing the program to crash. This article provides a work-around.

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Abstract

The ability to view the size of all your databases can be of great value. However, there is no command currently provided with IBM Informix Dynamic Server that shows the total size of each of your databases in an instance. If you want to know which databases are using the most space, but do not have a GUI or need an automated script, this article provides an SQL statement that will enable you to view the size of any database you wish to measure .

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Abstract

This article describes how to “discover” IBM Informix instances on a specified host and then gather further information about databases within each discovered instance.

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Abstract

One major factor to obtaining and sustaining good performance within an IBM Informix database is having the appropriate statistics available. This article provides another method and explores the “output to pipe” utility within SQL. There are several ways that statistics can be maintained, the most common, apart from home grown, are:

• AUS – Auto Update Statistics, driven by the dbscheduler and configured most easily through OAT
  • http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/informix/v121/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.perf.doc%2Fids_prf_742.htm
• Art Kagel’s dostats package – widely used in the IBM Informix Community and comprehensive
  • https://sourceforge.net/projects/iiug-software-repository/files/DBAdmin-Tools/utils2_ak

What is focused on here is having a simple method to generate and run efficient update statistics commands providing the recommended set of required statistics without getting into setting up AUS or compilation of dostats – i.e. a simple way to ensure your database has the relevant statistics generated using a single command; ideal for test environments or small production environments. This also makes use of the IBM Informix SQL statement “output to pipe” which is used to pass output to another program, in this example, “awk”.

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