Migrating and Upgrading to Informix 14 in-house or in the cloud. The easy and the hard way. by Lester Knutsen. There are several easy procedures to upgrade and migrate Informix. We will look at the easy way (in-place upgrades, dbexport, cdr migrate, backup/restore), but sometimes they may not work for you, and you need to create a custom process. We will go over a set of procedures and scripts using HPL, external tables, and parallel unloads/loads that I have used over the last few years to migrate from small systems up through terabyte-sized databases to VMs, new hardware, and the cloud.

Informix by default uses the Operating System (OS) to manage users. In this video, Lester Knutsen will demonstrate how to create a Non-OS Informix User that can access Informix databases without having an OS login. This is the first in a series of videos on Informix TechTalks by the IIUG. For more information on the International Informix Users Group (IIUG) please visit https://www.iiug.org

How do you use the command-line utilities to manage and monitor an Informix Server? We will discuss onstat, oncheck, and the new InformixHQ to manage your server.

How do you build databases and tables in Informix? We will discuss best practices for creating and managing databases and tables, partitioning, and database security. We will demonstrate object-oriented data types, using SQL to generate SQL Scripts and creating a Non-OS user for Informix database security.

How do you connect users and tools to an Informix Server from Windows, Unix, and the Web? We will discuss connections using Microsoft ODBC, Informix SDK, Java, PHP, DRDA, and other options. This is a Webcast reply from June 25, 2020.

How do you backup and restore an Informix Server? High Availability is crucial to a successful database. We will cover and demonstrate database backups, restores, and setting up High Availability Data Replication (HDR). This replay includes additional material on HDR setup and switching between Primary and Secondary Servers that is not covered in the original webcast.

How do you configure and maintain Informix Logs? The logs are critical to database reliability, and we will discuss best practices for managing and configuring Informix logical logs. We will also cover the backup and recovery of logical logs.

Disk IO is often the performance bottleneck for databases, every transaction needs to get written safely to disk fast. How do you set up and configure the disk space for an Informix Server? What disk and RAID configurations provide the best performance and reliability?

Informix Tutorials Webcast Replay - Informix Tutorial - Configuring a New Informix Server by Lester Knutsen, February 27, 2020. How to script configuring an Informix Server? This Webcast will cover everything you need to know to build with scripts, a new medium, or large server. The Webcast will be a review of the Informix ONCONFIG file and configuring memory, CPUs, Network, and Disk for a more extensive Informix Server configuration.

Informix Tutorials Webcast Replay - Getting Started with Informix by Lester Knutsen on Thursday, January 30, 2020, The Webcast is a step by step guide to installing and getting up and running a basic Informix Server. We will demonstrate using InformixHQ, the IBM Informix Knowledge Center, and how to find resources to get started with Informix.

Informix has Automated Update Statistics built into the server. Update Statistics collects metrics to enable the server to run your SQL faster. How do you monitor what tables and indexes need to have the statistics updated and manage Automated Update Statistics (AUS)?

How does the Informix SQL Optimizer choose which index or table or access method to use when running your SQL? This presentation will focus on how to view and understand the SQL Explain plan to see how your SQL is executed. The SQL Explain plan will provide times for each step in your process.

This presentation will focus on Best Practices for Informix database indexes. Every table should have at least one index, and managing indexes is an integral part of a DBA's task and time. Indexing is one method to optimize the performance of a database by reducing the number of disk reads when a query is executed. An index is a structure which is used to locate and access a row in a database table quickly. Indexes are used to enforce uniqueness, primary, and foreign keys and constraints. Indexes can also be a source of problems in a database and may slow performance down when misused.

At some point, every system gets outdated or starts showing its age. We all have had to deal with the headaches and logistical nightmares of moving our core databases from a legacy system on to a new server. In this webcast, we will cover different ways in which you can leverage Informix Enterprise Replication to move from an old server to a new one with minimal downtime, headache, and infrastructure needed. We will be covering cases of needing to handle the potential for fail backs, migrating between different OS platforms, as well as covering ideas to minimize end user interruption.

The second part of this webcast will further examine the Informix utilities which can be used to migrate data to a new system, and how to combine different utilities to speed up migrations and minimize downtime.

Migrating your Informix databases to new hardware and operating systems can be a daunting task. During this webcast, we will look at some of the challenges involved, and things to consider when migrating. We will look at the various tools available in Informix which can be used to unload and load data and cover the use of dbexport and dbimport.

IBM just announced the exciting new Informix 14 version in March. Advanced DataTools taught our first course for Informix DBAs on release 14 in April. We have been part of the beta programs and would like to share our findings including how to use the new installer, how to upgrade a database, and an introduction to the new Informix HQ server management.

End to end security is becoming more critical every day. In this webcast, we will demonstrate step by step how to set up basic SSL encryption for the Informix engine and how to configure ODBC clients for Windows and Linux to make sure all of your data is secured in transit.

Informix includes many Advanced SQL OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) functions that are rarely used, and we will demonstrate how to take advantage of them. OLAP is Business Intelligence queries that allow users to perform reporting for sales, marketing, inventory control, business processes, and many other functions. Typically it would require a multi-dimensional database. SQL OLAP functions allow you to roll-up, roll-down and slice and dice your data. We will demonstrate examples of Window Partitioning of data (before and after group by), Ranking, using row numbers, and before and after rows using ANSI SQL-99 standards, known as the Elementary OLAP package.

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.

An overview of using Informix External Tables for unloading and loading data and the benefits that they offer.

How do you capture the cost of SQL statements and activity on your database server. We will take a look at SQL Trace, and the Sysmaster tables that enable you to save and analyze the costs of your SQL.

Whether you are reorganizing a table, loading a table or doing a full data migration, you will want to use the unload/load capabilities of Informix. This is an in depth look at the various options available to you in such an endeavor as well as issues which should be taken into consideration.

Have you ever had a large batch job that had to be rerun from scratch when the primary server crashed after the job had been running for many hours? Wouldn't you like to have that job just continue running when your secondary server takes over? You can! This will be a live demonstration of how to configure your servers to take advantage of the Informix Transaction Survival feature.

This presentedesentation will demonstrate how to take advantage of the automatic Range Interval Partitioning and Rolling Windows to fragment your huge Informix tables. Automatically adding new partitions and fragments by interval can replace elaborate fragmentation schemes easily. The feature includes the ability to automatically drop partitions of old data reducing the need to purge old data.

The Informix database depends on the operating system for the CPU, Memory, Disk and Network resources. The presentation will focus on optimizing the Unix, AIX and Linux OS for the best database performance. We will review Kernel Settings, HugePages, enabling and disabling CPUs, OS disk scheduling, SAR and other tools for monitoring Unix and Linux.

For years Informix users who backup to local disks have been stuck with the limits of ontape or the tediousness and slowness of the Informix TSM system. Introduced in version 12 there is the brand new PSM system. Tom will cover the basics of getting started using it and may have you rethinking your backup strategies.

This session will cover Getting Started with Enterprise Replication.

This session will cover comparing similar data types. A review of normalization. Implementing difficult relationships.

This session will cover some of the basics of Informix Tuning, with a focus on monitoring and tuning of queries. Some of the areas that will be covered include: Identifying long running queries, Explain plans, Optimizer directives, Monitoring the buffer pool usage, Checking statistics, and Finding busy tables