Art Kagel developed and maintains the popular open source utility dostats to enable you to automate and keep up to date catalog statistics and data distribution that the Informix Optimizer needs in order to select the best method of running your SQL statements. He will describe how it works, how to compile it on several platforms, and why you should upgrade to the latest version. He will also discuss the Informix Automated Update Statistics (AUS) and how that compares to dostats.

Art presents UPDATE STATISTICS in depth, dostats, and his other free utilities for monitoring and tuning an Informix database in his utils2_ak package. Topics covered will include: *Table Level statistics and data distributions *Fragment Level statistics and data distributions *Update statistics for procedure/function *Providing data distributions for User Defined Types *Dostats and the art of balancing distribution quality with runtime performance *Other useful utilities in the utils2_ak package