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.

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.

How to use the infx profile dashboard to get detailed database stats

A short demonstration of how to get detailed table and index information using the infx table profiler. Includes statistics on sizing, locking and access for each table and index.

How to: Informix onbar backups from the infx instance dashboard

This video shows you how to run Informix onbar backups using the infx instance dashboard.

How to: Informix ontape restore using the infx instance dashboard

In this video demonstration see how to run ontape restores using the infx instance dashboard.

How to: Informix ontape backups from the infx instance dashboard

This video shows you how to run Informix ontape backups using the infx instance dashboard.

How to: Quickly access Informix onstat and onconfig information

Do you frequently find yourself needing quick access to simple information about your Informix instance? Info such as onconfig variables or other parameters?

While you can create templates with infx to specify the information you need, that is overkill when you just want to know something simple, such as the instance server number.

To fill this need, the infx status service has a simple interface that allows ad hoc access to the full details of the onstat parser library.

Lets take the instance server number as an example:

demo1@bobii:/home/informix>infx status vars=onconfig_servernum
23

How to: Informix HDR using infx services

While infx itself does not contain any services for Informix database replication, it can still be used to simplify the process.

The Informix High Availability Data Replication (HDR), is used to replicate all the databases in an Informix instance to another host. Informix Enterprise Replication (ER) is used to replicate individual databases and tables.

In this example I will show how to setup Informix HDR with infx services. The example assumes that Informix and infx are already installed on both servers.

The basic process is:

1. create a new instance on the second server
2. modify it to be a secondary instance
3. copy the primary instance data with the hot copy service
4. start HDR on the secondary
5. start HDR on the primary