File systems for Informix

When you are setting up an Informix instance you have two options for storing your data. One is to use chunk files, stored in file systems. The other is to access devices directly as raw chunks. This makes a difference to how you allocate the storage. It does not change the way you create and access databases, or the SQL and other commands used.

This post will concentrate on settings and options to use on file systems for chunk files. Other posts will cover using raw devices, RAID and SAN settings etc.

Basic Informix instance customization

When installing and setting up infx, you may want to customize the Informix environment.

The infx discovery service automatically detects instances and sets their basic Informix connection parameters e.g. INFORMIXDIR, INFORMIXSERVER, and ONCONFIG. You may also need to specify a DBDATE parameter, or other environment variable such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

It is important to make these settings before starting an instance with the infx utilities. These variables will be set before start up, as well as when executing the infx services.

infx uses a multi level approach that allows you to apply settings to just one specific instance, or to all instances.