Introduction to the infx management suite

An introduction and demonstration of the infx management suite, the next generation tool for managing Informix databases.

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

Inside infx: How the onstat parser works

The majority of information you see from infx has come from the output of the Informix onstat command. Only a small percentage (at this time anyway) comes from the sysmaster database.

There are two reasons for that:

1. onstat is available even when sysmaster isn't
2. onstat outputs loads of information and it's very fast

Simplified management of informix databases

For over 20 years I have been working as a DBA with Informix, and in that time I have been asked by clients to script or automate just about any database related task you can think of.

My latest challenge has been to bring that experience together into a suite of flexible and easy to use utilities.

I have built the basic or "core" version, it's a start, but there are still more areas to be covered.

What this blog is for:

• announcements about the infx software
• discussion about what it does
• discussion about what it should be doing

And the first announcement is that the site, infx.me, is now up with the basic documentation and description of infx.

Up for discussion, am I crazy trying this, or is it about time someone did?