Informix Performance Monitoring & Tuning

Our Informix performance monitoring & tuning services:

Informix Tuning

An Informix tuning exercise is designed to deliver performance and efficiency improvements. The scope can be either system-wide or just focused on a very specific performance problem.

Informix Tools

We offer a full suite of management and monitoring tools from AGS specifically designed to work with Informix and we advise our customers on how to get the most out of all the available tools.

Why tune an Informix database system?

  • Protect your investment. Most companies invest heavily in their database infrastructure. Database tuning helps protect that investment by ensuring you get the most out of the available network and hardware resources. Database tuning can also help in controlling and even reducing software licensing costs.
  • Reduce risk. A poorly performing database impacts user productivity and system reliability, and it presents a real risk to the availability of mission critical applications. Continuous performance monitoring and measurement is key to avoiding costly performance degradation and unplanned outages.
  • Improve efficiency. Every release of Informix introduces new features and capabilities. Understanding how these capabilities can affect your own system is important in determining which features to use and which to avoid. This is often a complex decision-making process but accurate performance measurement is a key component.

What our customers say…

A good performance tuning exercise can yield massive benefits very quickly. This means that you can get very high return from relatively low expenditure.

It’s unrealistic to imagine that any complex system can operate at peak performance without regular intervention. Database systems are no exception. And yet many companies put off a health check or performance review because they believe the solution will be expensive or unsuccessful.

Here are just a few of the many examples of small projects we’ve performed over the years that have delivered huge value to our customers at very low cost.

Bank saves £150k with just a 2 hour project

We reduced our overnight loading time by 85% saving a massive capital expenditure in new hardware. We estimate the total saving to be more than £150K over 12 months.
Industry: Financial Services
Project: Load Process SQL optimization
Duration: 2 hours
Logistics company gets performance delivered

We increased the life expectancy of our existing applications and database systems by more than 2 years - allowing us to invest in future strategic development and to release valuable technical resource from day-to-day firefighting on our core transactional system.
Industry: Logistics
Project: SQL Optimization (Indexing Strategy + Optimizer Statistics Improvements)
Duration: 2 Days
IFA gets big return with a small investment

In only one day, we improved the overall performance of our Informix applications by 40%. We estimate the user productivity benefit to equate to 3 FTE per week.
Industry: Financial Services
Project: Server Configuration Changes
Duration: 6 hours
Gaming operator bets on Oninit and wins

With Oninit's guidance, we resolved a server performance issue on our Informix system that had been present for 12 months and only present during peak load. Because we now have the right tools available to us, we have the ability in our own team to find similar problems in the future.
Industry: Online Betting and Gaming
Project: Server Configuration Changes
Duration: 4.5 hours
Watch manufacturer makes massive time saving

Performance of our back-end processes were concerning us and it was becoming a drain on valuable resources. Once we were using the right tools the problem became immediately obvious. We wouldn't have been able to resolve the problem so quickly without Oninit's help.
Industry: Time piece manufacturer
Project: Batch Process SQL Optimization
Duration: 2 Days

Understanding the scope of a performance tuning project.

Every successful performance tuning exercise will have a clear objective and a well defined approach to performance measurement. The scope of a performance tuning exercise will determine the tools we use and the approach we take. Understanding the scope is the first and most important step in tackling the problem.

A database performance problem is either general across the entire system, or specific to a process within a database application or even a single SQL statement.

The difference in scope is important if you consider that when we make changes to the database server configuration or the database system architecture, those changes will potentially affect all database workload on that system. In our experience, it’s crucial to get the scope as small as possible.

Examples of general performance issues:

  • “When the number of application users exceeds 250 the performance dives.”
  • “When the database back-up starts all applications on the system stop responding for 5-10 seconds.”
  • “We turned encryption on and our applications are running 30% slower.”

Examples of specific performance issues:

  • “A frequently executed SQL query is taking too long to return.”
  • “A report that used to finish in 20 minutes is now taking more than 2 hours.”
  • “An overnight batch program isn’t completing within its processing window and sometimes needs to be aborted.”

Performance tuning or health check. What’s the difference?

A performance tuning exercise is focused on assessing whether performance in relation to database workload is being optimized. This could be specific workload like a SQL statement or a complete database application.

A health check is designed to look at the health of the entire database system and its environment. It explores 5 key areas where we can measure the overall health of a database environment. A health check does not exclusively focus on database performance, but it does explore system efficiency.

Advanced Informix Tools

We use advanced Informix tools every day to deliver powerful database performance monitoring and tuning.

The Server Studio and Sentinel tools deliver a suite of capabilities, including near real-time and historical performance monitoring, troubleshooting and root cause analysis as well as ability to track trends and investigate impending problems before they become an issue.

Using these best-in-class solutions ensures your critical IBM Informix databases remain up and running, performing at peak levels, to improve productivity, manage change and assure availability of vital business information.

We recommend that all our customers use these advanced monitoring and management tools to get the most out of your Informix installations.

Release 10 Bundle — System Requirements:

  • Operating System: — Windows/XP/2003/2008/2012/2016/ 7/ 8/ 10 — Solaris 6/7/8, Linux, HP Unix, IBM AIX, MAC OS
  • Java 2 Platform: — J2SE 1.8, 1.7 or J2SE 1.6.0_25
  • Database Servers: — IBM Informix® Dynamic Server (IDS) V.7.x, V.9.x, V.10, 11.50, 11.70, 12.10, 14.10 — IBM Informix® Extended Parallel Server (XDS) V. 8.3 — IBM Informix® OnLine V.5.10

Server Studio™ provides a comprehensive suite of proven, easy to use tools to effectively manage common database tasks including:

  • Database SQL application development and debugging
  • Scheme management
  • Configuration auditing and change management
  • Performance tuning
  • Data storage management and reorganisation
  • Database security administration

Sentinel™ automates proactive management and real-time monitoring of Informix environments by providing:

  • 24×7 operational monitoring of IBM Informix DBMS servers
  • 24×7 operational monitoring of the IDS host platform
  • Continuous time-series measurement data of server performance
  • Execution of regularly scheduled maintenance tasks
  • Highly flexible, multi-level performance degradation alerts
  • Automatic response management to server events in real time

Looking to boost your database performance?