Informix

IBM Informix

This wiki article says, "Informix is generally considered to be optimized for environments with very low or no database administration, including use as an embedded database. It has a long track record of supporting very high transaction rates and providing uptime characteristics needed for mission critical applications such as manufacturing lines and reservation systems. Informix has been widely deployed in the retail sector, where the low administration overhead makes it useful for in-store deployments." I have worked with Informix in both manufacturing and reservations.

I am currently working with Informix 9.40.FC7 as an adminisrator not a developer

• onstat commands are predefined queries that pull from the sysmaster database, but are not output in the best format
• Learn the sysmaster database
• ESQL/C very fast for accessing the database
• dbacces and isql are horrible interfaces
• Raw devices are faster
• optimize your statistics plan
• HPL (High Performance Loader) is a very awkward tool, but can unload and reload tables quicker in a raw format
• Create enough space for logical logging to prevent downtime if a tape fails. The engine will stop running if these logs can't be backed up
• Inserts on large tables can really slow down OLTP databases
• Must do a dummy archive, ontape -s -L 0 w/TAPEDEV set to /dev/null, for some configuration changes
• Our Informix 9.40.FC7, which is 64 bit, has a 2GiB file limitation writing to HP-UX 11.11's file system