Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Simple infx commands: infx dbs

It has always seemed strange to me, that a database management system, such as Informix, has no command to list all the databases.

You need to use SQL to get this information out.

Of course, if you use infx you can easily list out all the databases in your instance using the infx dbs command.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Video: How to install infx

A short video demonstration of how to install infx. Less than four minutes and you are done, quicker still if you don't keep stopping to explain it.

Friday, July 20, 2012

infx v1.4b available for download


infx v1.4b is now available for download at http://www.infx.me/download.

This version mostly contains performance enhancements, especially in the dashboards, as well as some bug fixes and other features.

New features include...
  1. infx sqlhelp command line help for the SQL Admin API
  2. independent refresh of dashboard sections/consoles

Full release notes are included below.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Monitoring informix with nagios and infx

infx contains a status monitor, that will provide the real time state of an instance. It doesn't record any history, or send any notifications.

If, for example, you want to be notified when there is a problem, you need to use a third party monitoring tool. infx provides the status information about informix, and the monitoring tool records the history and sends notifications etc.

The purpose of this post is to describe the process of integrating the infx status monitor with another monitoring tool, in this case nagios.

overview

  1. set up infx server with nagios user and plug in
  2. create the check_infx command to output the host status
  3. set up nagios sudo permissions for check_infx command
  4. define the infx service check in nagios
  5. restart the nagios service

Monday, May 14, 2012

infx v1.3b available for download

infx v1.3b is now available for download at http://www.infx.me/download.

This version contains bug fixes as well as enhancements.

New features include...
  1. automatic apache set up
  2. email notifications
  3. ifxclone utility

Full release notes are included below.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

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.

Monday, April 9, 2012

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.