Informix Update New Features 11.70.xC1+

Informix Update
New Features 11.70.xC1+

Rickard Linck (rickard.linck@se.ibm.com)

May 31, 2012 © 2012 IBM Corporation

IBM Data Servers Software
Use your data more effectively and efficiently
Optimized for extreme speed
Optimized for a diverse range of delivering 10 times the performance
solutions requiring maximum of conventional databases
flexibility and performance

Optimized for near hands free Optimized for solutions requiring
administration, high availability the extreme levels of transaction
and clustering for transaction & data volume and performance
intensive solutions

The industry’s broadest range of database and data warehouse
management innovations optimized for every business need

2 © 2012 IBM Corporation

IBM Informix
“Set it and Forget it”

…for near hands free
administration, high
availability and clustering
for transaction intensive
solutions
Resilient Agile Everywhere
Reliable Flexible Minimal
Secure Fast Affordable

Cost
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and life critical Solutions
solutions

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Retailers worldwide service delivery US Supermarkets worldwide
providers
“…Intrado provides the core of U.S. 9-1-1…
We needed a fast database; one that would
respond immediately, every time…”


Informix Innovation …
v11

Global Availability Informix Deep Extreme
Active-Active Warehouse Compression Performance
Clusters And Reliability

Enhancements in all areas:

Design Development OpenAdmin Tool Safe and Secure Mac OS/X
Administration API Common Criteria Support


Themes for Informix Future Release

Deep Embed

Modernization
Warehouse

Smart Data Cloud

Informix in 2012 (from IBM’s pricebook)
Databases: Tools:
– C-ISAM v7.26 – Client SDK v3.70
– SE (Standard Engine) v7.25 – ESQL/C v5.20
– ESQL/COBOL v7.25
– OnLine v5.20 – 4GL Compiler v7.50
– Informix v11.50, v11.70 (Express, Choice, – 4GL Interactive Debugger v7.50
Growth, Ultimate, Warehouse) – 4GL RDS (Rapid Development System) v7.50
• Storage Optimization Feature – SQL v3.70
• Excalibur TextSearch DataBlade v1.31 – Genero v2.40
• Geodetic DataBlade v3.12 – I-Spy v2.x
• C-ISAM DataBlade v1.10 – Data Director for Web v2.x
• Spatial DataBlade – Server Administrator v1.6
• TimeSeries Real Time Loader
• Video Foundation DataBlade Connectivity:
• Web DataBlade v4.13 – NETv5.20
• Workgroup DataBlade – STAR v5.10
• Image Foundation DataBlade v2.0x – Connect Runtime v3.70
– XPS (Extended Parallel Server) v8.51 – JDBC Driver/Embedded SQL v3.70
• XPS Storage Optimization Feature – Enterprise Gateway Manager v7.31
– Red Brick Warehouse v6.3 – Enterprise Gateway w DRDA v7.31
– MaxConnect v1.x


Informix 11.70 releases
Major release:
– 11.70.xC1 – October 2010

Minor releases:
– 11.70.xC2 – March 2011
– 11.70.xC3 – June 2011
– 11.70.xC4 – October 2011
– 11.70.xC5 – May 2012


11.70.xC1 Features - 1
Installation
– Installation application provides seamless installation and smarter configuration
– Changes to installation commands
– Simpler configuration for silent installation

Migration
– New default behavior during upgrades
– Upgrading a high-availability cluster while it is on line
– dbschema utility enhancement for omitting the specification of an owner
– dbexport utility enhancement for omitting the specification of an owner
– Generating storage spaces and logs with the dbschema utility

High-availability
– Quickly clone a primary server
– Transaction completion during cluster failover
– Running DDL statements on secondary servers
– Monitoring high-availability servers
– Running dbschema, dbimport, and dbexport utilities on secondary servers

Administration
– Automatic storage provisioning ensures space is available
– Backup and restore is now cloud aware
– Easier event alarm handling
– Defragmenting partitions
– Automatically optimize data storage
– Automatically terminate idle sessions
– Notification of corrupt indexes
– Prevent the accidental disk initialization of your instance or another instance
– Automatic allocation of secondary partition header pages for extending the
extent map
– MQ messaging enhancements
– Session-level control of how much memory can be allocated to a query
– Deferred extent sizing of tables created with default storage specifications
– New environment variable enables invalid character data to be used by DB-
Access, dbexport, and High Performance Loader
– New onconfig parameter to specify the default escape character
– ifxcollect tool for collecting data for specific problems
– dbschema utility enhancements for generating storage spaces and logs
– Enhancements to the OpenAdmin Tool
– Enhancements to the OAT Schema Manager plug-in
– Enhancements to the OAT Replication plug-in

Application Development
– Database extensions are automatically registered
– Spatial data type and functions are built in and automatically registered
– Time series data types and functions are built-in and automatically registered
– Setting the file seek position for large files
– Faster basic text searches on multiple columns
– Virtual processor is created automatically for XML publishing
– SQL expressions as arguments to the COUNT function
– Specifying the extent size when user-defined indexes are created
– Syntax support for DDL statements with IF [NOT] EXISTS conditions
– Simplified SQL syntax for defining database tables
– Debugging Informix SPL routines with Optim Development Studio

Embeddability
– Information about embedding Informix instances
– Enhanced utility for deploying Informix instances
– Tutorial to deploy and embed Informix
– Deployment assistant simplifies snapshot capture and configuration
– Enhanced ability to compress and to extract compressed snapshots
– Improved return codes for the oninit utility
– Sample scripts for embedding IBM Informix 11.70 database servers

Enterprise Replication
– Create a new replication domain by cloning a server
– Add a server to a replication domain by cloning
– Automating application connections to Enterprise Replication servers
– Replicate tables without primary keys
– Set up and manage a grid for a replication domain
– Handle a potential log wrap situation in Enterprise Replication
– Improved Enterprise Replication error code descriptions
– Repair replication inconsistencies by time stamp
– Temporarily disable an Enterprise Replication server
– Synchronize all replicates simultaneously
– Monitor the quality of replicated data

Security
– Trusted connections improve security for multiple-tier application
environments
– Selective row-level auditing
– Simplified administration of users without operating system accounts
(UNIX, Linux)

Performance
– Less root node contention with Forest Of Trees indexes
– Fragment-level statistics
– Automatic detection of stale statistics
– Query optimizer support for multi-index scans
– Improving performance by reducing buffer reads
– Automatically add CPU virtual processors
– Large pages support on Linux
– Improve name service connection time
– Faster C user-defined routines
– Automatic light scans on tables
– Alerts for tables with in-place alter operations
– Reduced overhead for foreign key constraints on very large child tables
Warehousing
– Query optimizer support for star-schema and snowflake-schema queries
– Partitioning table and index storage by a LIST strategy
– Partitioning table and index storage by an INTERVAL strategy
– Improved concurrency while redefining table storage distributions


Informix 11.70.xC2 - New Enhancements
Announced/available on 2011-03-29
Installation
– Enhanced installation application (Linux, UNIX)
Administration
– New event alarms
– The returned MAX_PDQPRIORITY value in a query to the SNMP rdbmsSrvParamTable
– New SQL administration API arguments
Application Development
– Improved results of basic text search queries
– Table and column aliases in DML statements
– Case-insensitive queries on NCHAR and NVARCHAR text strings
Embeddability
– Embedding Informix software without root privileges (UNIX, Linux)
– Deploying an RPM image of Informix software (Linux)
OAT - Enhancements
– to the OpenAdmin Tool
– to the Schema Manager plug-in
Performance
– Improve network connection performance and scalability
Warehousing
– Informix Warehouse Accelerator

Enhanced installation (Linux, UNIX)
You can install the products without root privileges
– Easier to install Informix in environments where root privileges are
restricted or where Informix will be part of an embedded solution.
• The resulting non-root installation does not support some features such as ER,
distributed connections, and HA clusters.

RPMBUILD
– On Linux operating systems if you have rpmbuild installed you can create
an RPM image to simplify redistribution to multiple computers.

Deploying an RPM image of Informix software (Linux)
– you can customize an RPM Package Manager image to exclude
database server and client products that you do not plan to use.
• You can reduce the size of the distributable image.
– You can then embed the configured installation to multiple Linux
computers that support RPM.
• Deploy the image without the system resource demands of the installation
application

Event Alarms / SNMP
New event alarms: Event alarm class IDs 81 and 83 added.
– 81 indicates logical log corruption.
– 83 indicates that a shared disk secondary server could not become the
primary server because the primary server was still active.

The returned MAX_PDQPRIORITY value in a query to the SNMP
rdbmsSrvParamTable
– When you use the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to
query rdbmsSrvParamTable, SNMP now returns the current
MAX_PDQPRIORITY value, including changes made with the onmode
-D, onmode -wm, and onmode -wf commands. If an error occurs, SNMP
returns the value of -1.


New SQL administration API arguments
The following new arguments are available with the SQL admin API
task() and admin() functions:

– create database: equivalent to the CREATE DATABASE statement.

– drop database: equivalent to the DROP DATABASE statement.
• deletes the entire database, including all of the system catalog tables,
objects, and data.

– ontape archive: invokes the ontape utility to create a backup.

– onbar: equivalent to invoking the onbar utility to create backups.

– onsmsync: invokes the onsmsync utility to synchronize the sysutils
database, the storage manager, and the emergency boot file.


Examples
Create the database named demodbs with unbuffered logging:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task("create database with log","demodbs");

Create a database that is not case-sensitive named demodbs2 with ANSI
compliant logging in the dbspace named dataspace1:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task("create database with log mode ansi nlscase
insensitive","demodbs2","dataspace1");

Create a database named demodbs3 with a French-Canadian locale in the
dbspace name dataspace1:
EXECUTE FUNCTION TASK ("create
database","demodbs3","dataspace1","fr_ca.8859-1");

Create a level 0 archive in the directory path /local/informix/backup/:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task("ontape archive","/local/informix/backup/");

Create a level 0 archive in the directory path /local/informix/backup/ with a block
size of 256 KB:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task("ontape archive directory level 0",
"/local/informix/backup/","256");


Improved results of Basic Text Search queries
You can improve the results of basic text search queries by
choosing a text analyzer that best fits your data and query needs. A
text analyzer determines how the text is indexed.
– The snowball analyzer indexes word stems.
– The CJK analyzer processes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text.
– The Soundex analyzer indexes words by sound.
– Other analyzers are variations of these analyzers and the standard
analyzer.
– You can also create your own analyzer.

And now you can also:
– create a thesaurus of synonyms to use during indexing.
– specify different stopwords for each column being indexed instead of
using the same stopwords for all indexed columns.
– query each column in a composite index individually.
– increase the maximum number of query results.


BTS Analyzers
Analyzers:
– cjk: Processes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text. Ignores surrogates.
– cjk.ws: Processes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text. Processes surrogates.
– esoundex: Processes text into pronunciation codes.
– keyword: Processes input text as a single token.
– simple: Processes alphabetic characters only without stopwords.
– snowball: Processes text into stem words.
– snowball.language: Processes text into stem words in the specified language.
– soundex: Processes text into four pronunciation codes.
– standard: Default. Processes alphabetic characters, special characters, and
numbers with stopwords.
– stopword: Processes alphabetic characters only with stopwords.
– udr.udr_name: The name of a user-defined analyzer.
– whitespace: Creates tokens based on whitespace only
– or create your own analyzer
The Snowball analyzer is similar to the Standard analyzer except that is
converts words to stem words: different words are indexed with the same
stem word:
– accept [accept]
– acceptable [accept]
– acceptance [accept]

Table and column aliases in DML statements
The SQL parser supports new contexts for declaring aliases in
SELECT, DELETE, and UPDATE statements.
The alias is a temporary name that is not registered in the system
catalog of the database, and that persists only while the statement
is running.

– SELECT statements and subqueries can declare an alias in the
Projection clause for columns in the select list, and can use the aliases
(as an alternative to the name or the select number) to reference those
columns in the GROUP BY clause.
– DELETE statements can declare an alias for a local or remote target
table, and can use that alias elsewhere in the same DELETE statement
to reference that table.
– UPDATE statements can declare an alias for a local or remote target
table, and can use that alias elsewhere in the same UPDATE statement
to reference that table.

Examples
DELETE overstock@cleveland:stock AS ocs
WHERE manu_code =
(SELECT manu_code FROM ocs WHERE manu_code
MATCHES 'H*');

UPDATE nmosdb@wnmserver1:test r_t
SET name=(SELECT name FROM test
WHERE test.id = r_t.id)
WHERE EXISTS(
SELECT 1 FROM test WHERE test.id = r_t.id );


Case-insensitive queries on NCHAR and
NVARCHAR text strings
In previous releases, strings stored in all Informix databases were treated
as case-sensitive. Operations designed to disregard the case of text
strings require a bts index or a functional index for each query.
In this release a database is still created as case-sensitive by default.
However, you can use the NLSCASE INSENSITIVE option with the
CREATE DATABASE statement to create a database that ignores the
case of text strings.
– For example, querying "McDavid" returns "McDavid", "mcdavid", "MCDAVID",
and "Mcdavid".
Ignores letter case only on NCHAR and NVARCHAR data types, but it
treats the other built-in character data types (CHAR, LVARCHAR, and
VARCHAR) as case-sensitive.

Note: You cannot include both case-sensitive and case-insensitive
databases in a distributed query.


IBM OpenAdmin Tool (OAT) Version 2.72

Back up the storage spaces for a database server:
– Configure ontape or onbar to back up the storage spaces.
– Schedule the backups to run automatically.
– Run a backup of the storage spaces on demand.
– Review the most recent backups and the next scheduled
backups of the storage spaces.
– Review the backup log.


OAT – Automatic Backups


IBM OpenAdmin Tool (OAT) Version 2.72
Create system reports based on the historical data for a database
server
– information about the SQL that were running, including the slowest and
the one with the most I/O time and with the most buffer activity.

Switch to the next logical-log file

When you develop a plug-in for OAT, you can specify a minimum
required version of OAT.
You can uninstall plug-ins for OAT.
– In previous releases, you could disable the plug-ins, but you could not
uninstall them.
You can restore OAT menu items that are deleted.
– In previous editions, you could delete menu items, but you could not
restore them.


OAT: Schema Manager plug-in Version 2.72
Changes include:
– Create a database on the Schema Manager page
• specify the locale for the database.
• specify that the database is not case-sensitive.
– Drop a database

– Disable index :
• When you create a table and add a foreign key constraint, you can disable
the index that is created automatically for the foreign key constraint.
Disabling the index can improve the efficiency of INSERT, DELETE, and
UPDATE operations on large child tables.


Schema Manager


Create Database wizard

Review the SQL Statement that creates the database:
EXECUTE FUNCTION ADMIN ('CREATE DATABASE WITH BUFFERED LOG
NLSCASE INSENSITIVE', 'iasdb', 'datadbs', 'sv_SE.8859-1');

Improve network connection performance
and scalability
You can improve the performance and scalability of network
connections on UNIX by using the NUMFDSERVERS parameter.
Adjusts the maximum number of poll threads for the server to use
when migrating TCP/IP connection across virtual processors (VPs).
Adjusting the number of poll threads, for example, by increasing the
number of poll threads beyond the default number, is useful
– if the database server has a high rate of new connect and disconnect
requests or
– if you find a high amount of contention between network shared file
(NSF) locks.
• For example, if you have multiple CPU VPs and poll treads and this results
in NSF locking*, you can increase the value of NUMFDSERVERS (and you
can increase the number of poll threads specified in the NETTYPE
configuration parameter) to reduce NSF lock contention.
– *use onstat -g ath command to display information about all threads which
includes a status, such as mutex wait nsf.lock, which indicates that you
have a significant amount of NSF lock contention.
Default 4, Max 50.

Informix Warehouse Accelerator - IWA
An Informix product that delivers faster analytic query responses
transparently to all Informix users. The accelerator integrates into
an Informix environment, providing high-performance query
software that is based on advanced data in-memory technology.
The accelerator helps enable a new class of high speed business
intelligence (BI).

Includes a graphical user interface plugin for IBM Data Studio that
you can use to perform accelerator administration tasks.
You can use the accelerator with a database server that supports a
mixed workload (an online transactional processing (OLTP)
database and a data warehouse database), or use the accelerator
with a database server that supports only a data warehouse
database


IWA requires you to do…
No query tuning and optmizer hints
No database tuning
No index creation, reorganization
No update Statistics
No partioning/Fragementation
No storage management/page size configuration
No database/schema changes
No application changes
No summary tables/materialized views/query tables
No buying more expensive hardware*
No change of expectations
Power of Simplicity!

Informix Warehouse Accelerator – Breakthrough
Technology for Performance
Extreme Compression Row & Columnar Database
3 to 1 compression ratio Row format within Informix for transactional
workloads and columnar data access via
accelerator for OLAP queries.

Multi-core and Vector 7 1 In Memory Database
Optimized Algorithms 3rd generation database technology avoids
Avoiding locking or synchronization I/O. Compression allows huge databases
6 2
to be completely memory resident

5 3
4
Frequency Partitioning
Predicate evaluation on Enabler for the effective parallel access of
compressed data the compressed data for scanning.
Often scans w/o decompression Horizontal and Vertical Partition
during evaluation Elimination.

Massive Parallelism
All cores are used for each query

Comes with Smart Analytics Studio, a GUI tool, for configuring data mart with IWA


IWA - architecture
OLTP Client BI Client
Linux Intel 64‐bit
Informix Warehouse Accelerator
64‐bit Unix/Linux 1 coordinator node per 4 worker nodes

TCP/IP & Manages the distribution
DRDA accelerated queries tasks such as loading
data and and query
Informix Database Server query results coordinator node processing.
Query Router Performs data
compression and
query processing
with extreme
parallelism

fact table
worker node worker node worker node worker node
dimension tables
Memory

other tables compressed data: compressed data: compressed data: compressed data:
25% of fact table + 25% of fact table + 25% of fact table + 25% of fact table +
own copy of all own copy of all own copy of all own copy of all
DWADIR=$IWA_INSTALL_DIR/dwa/demo
START_PORT=21020 dimension tables dimension tables dimension tables dimension tables
NUM_NODES=5 (1 coord, 4 worker)
WORKER_SHM=0.7 (70% of mem)
Disk/SSD

COORDINATOR_SHM=0.05 (5% of mem)
DRDA_INTERFACE="eth0"
accelerator storage directory: compressed data on disk

Configuration Scenarios
Alternative 1: Install IWA on a separate Linux box

Informix Database Server Informix Warehouse Accelerator

64‐bit RHEL 5/SUSE 11
Solaris 10/AIX 6.1/HP‐UX 11.31

Alternative 2: Install Informix and IWA in the same symmetric
multiprocessing system

Informix Database Server Informix Warehouse Accelerator


Note: IWA requires Linux on Intel x64 (64-bit EM64T) Xenon

v11.70.xC3 – 29th June 2011
Administration
Automatic read-ahead operations
Configuring the server response to low memory
Reserving memory for critical activities
Connection Manager enhancements
Enhancements to the OpenAdmin Tool

Embeddability
Managing message logs in embedded and enterprise environments

Developing
Built-in SQL compatibility functions for string manipulation and trigonometric support

High availability clusters and Enterprise Replication
Automatically connecting to a grid
Code set conversion for Enterprise Replication
Enhancements to the Informix Replication Plug-in for OAT

Security
Non-root installations support shared-memory and stream-pipe connections
Retaining numbers for audit log files
Restrict operating system properties for mapped users

Time Series data
Simplified handling of time series data
Informix TimeSeries Plug-in for OAT

New features – Low Memory Manager
Configuring the server response to low memory
Configure the actions that the server takes to continue processing when
memory is critically low. You can specify the criteria for terminating
sessions based on idle time, memory usage, and other factors so that the
targeted application can continue and avoid out-of-memory problems.
Configuring the low memory response is useful for embedded applications
that have memory limitations.

1. Set the LOW_MEMORY_MGR configuration parameter to 1
2. EXECUTE FUNCTION task("scheduler lmm enable",
"LMM START THRESHOLD", "10MB",
"LMM STOP THRESHOLD", "20MB",
"LMM IDLE TIME", "300");

start_threshold_size = 5MB – 95MB or % of SHMTOTAL
stop_threshold_size = 10MB – 100MB or % of SHMTOTAL
idle_time = between 1 and 86400 secs.


Monitor with onstat -g lmm
$ onstat –g lmm
Low Memory Manager
Control Block 0x4cfca220
Memory Limit 300000 KB - memory to which the server is attempting to adhere
Used 149952 KB - memory currently used by the server
Start Threshold 10240 KB - automatic low memory management start threshold
Stop Threshold 10 MB - automatic low memory management stop threshold
Idle Time 300 Sec - time after which almm considers a session idle
Internal Task Yes - Yes = using Informix procedures / No = user defined procs
Task Name ‘Low Memory Manager’
Low Mem TID 0x4cfd7178
# Extra Segments 0
Low Memory Manager Tasks
Task Count Last Run
Kill User Sessions 267 04/04/2011 16:57 - Automatic terminated sessions
Kill All Sessions 1 04/04/2011 16:58
Reconfig(reduce) 1 04/04/2011 16:59 - freed blocks of unused memory
Reconfig(restore) 1 04/04/2011 17:59 - restored services and configuration
Last 20 Sessions Killed
Ses ID Username Hostname PID Time
194 bjorng dockebo 13433 04/04/2011 16:57
201 bjorng dockebo 13394 04/04/2011 16:57
198 bjorng dockebo 13419 04/04/2011 16:57
190 bjorng dockebo 13402 04/04/2011 16:57
199 bjorng dockebo 13431 04/04/2011 16:57


New features - LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE
You can reserve a specific amount of memory for use when critical
activities (such as rollback activities) are required and the database server
has limited free memory. This prevents the database server from crashing
if the server runs out of free memory during critical activities.
Max size of reserved memory is 20 percent of the value of SHMVIRTSIZE
For example, to reserve 512 kilobytes, specify:
LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE 512K the size of memory reserved in bytes.

$ onstat -g seg
id key addr size ovhd class blkused blkfree
8945678 52604801 44000000 133652480 1006264 R 32627 3
8978447 52604802 4bf76000 131072000 769136 V 17181 14819
Total: - - 264724480 - - 49808 14822

Virtual segment low memory reserve (bytes):4194304
Low memory reserve used 0 times and used maximum block size 0 bytes

number times that the database server has used this memory

Note: Can also be changed by onmode –wm/wf maximum memory required

AUTO_READAHEAD
Use read-ahead operations automatically to improve performance.
The database server can automatically use asynchronous
operations for data or it can avoid them if the data for the query is
already cached.

Use the AUTO_READAHEAD onconfig parameter all queries
Use the SET ENVIRONMENT AUTO_READAHEAD for a particular
session.
– 0 = Disable automatic read-ahead requests.
– 1 = Enable automatic read-ahead requests in the standard mode. The
database server will automatically process read-ahead requests only
when a query waits on I/O.
– 2 = Enable automatic read-ahead requests in the aggressive mode. The
database server will automatically process read-ahead requests at the
start of the query and continuously through the duration of the query.

The RA_THRESHOLD parameter is deprecated with this
release!

Automatic read-ahead operations
Asynchronous page requests can improve query performance by
overlapping query processing with the processing necessary to
retrieve data from disk and put it in the buffer pool.
Avoids read-ahead if data cached in bufferpool
Set up and administration of automatic read-ahead
– ONCONFIG: AUTO_READAHEAD mode[,readahead_cnt]
– Environment: SET ENVIRONMENT AUTO_READAHEAD mode
– onmode –wm/fm AUTOREADAHEAD=mode

Value/Mode Comments
2 Enable automatic requests aggressive mode
1 Default: Enable requests in standard mode
0 Disable automatic read-ahead requests
readahead_cnt Optional: Read ahead pages

AUTO_READAHEAD deprecates ONCONFIG parameters RA_PAGES
and RA_THRESHOLD!

Settings explained
Modes 1 and 2:
– 1 = Enable automatic read-ahead requests in the standard mode which is the
default.
• The database server will automatically process read-ahead requests only when a
query waits on I/O.
• Appropriate for most production environments, even cached environments.
– 2 = Enable automatic read-ahead requests in the aggressive mode.
• The database server will automatically process read-ahead requests at the start of the
query and continuously through the duration of the query
• It might be slightly more effective:
– For some scans that read a small amount of data
– In situations in which you switch between turning read-ahead off for small scans and on for
longer scans
– For scans that look only at a small number of rows, because the server performs read-ahead
operations immediately rather than waiting for the scan to encounter I/O.
• Use aggressive read-ahead operations only in situations in which you tested both
settings and know that aggressive read-ahead operations are more effective. Do not
use aggressive read-ahead operations if you are not sure that they are more effective.

readahead_cnt Optional: Number of read ahead pages
• When not set, the default is 128 (range 4-4096) pages


Monitor with onstat -g rah
$ onstat –g rah
Read Ahead
# threads 4
# Requests 150501
# Continued 1017
# Memory Failures 0
Q depth 0
Last Thread Add 04/06/2011.14:34
Partition ReadAhead Statistics
Buffer Disk Hit Data Index Idx/Dat
Partnum Reads Reads Ratio # Reqs Eff # Reqs Eff # Reqs Eff
0x200003 2412176 587381 75 0 0 150499 67 0 0
0x100163 4020 12 99 1 77 2 66 172 0
0x100165 1010 8 99 1 50 2 50 26 0
0x1001c8 107 4 96 0 0 1 0 2 34
0x1001c9 7 2 71 0 0 0 0 1 100

# Continued Number of times a read-ahead request continued to occur
# Memory Failures Number of failed requests because of insufficient memory
Q Depth Depth of request queue
Last Thread Add Date and time when the last read-ahead thread was added
Hit Ratio Cache hit ratio for the partition
# Reqs Number of data page read ahead requests.
Eff Efficiency of the read-ahead requests. This is the ratio been the number of pages
requested by read-ahead operations to the number of pages that were already cached
and for which a read-ahead operations was not needed. Values are between 0 and
100. A higher number means that read ahead is beneficial.


Connection Manager 3.70.xC3 enhancements
The Connection Manager performs three roles:
1. Rule-based connection redirection
2. Connection unit load balancing
• Grids and replicate sets: LATENCY, FAILURE, and WORKLOAD
• High-availability clusters and Server sets: WORKLOAD
3. Cluster failover

You can now configure a single Connection Manager (CM) instance to automatically
manage client connection requests for a combination of a) high availability clusters, b) grids,
c) server sets, and d) Enterprise Replication (ER) servers.

Before you had to use a separate CM instance to manage each type of connection unit. For
example, you had to use one CM instance for servers that were in a grid and another CM
instance for servers that were in a high-availability cluster.

To make configuration easier, most of the command-line options are deprecated and
options are set using the configuration file. In addition, the format of the configuration file is
more intuitive than before.

Because a single CM instance supports multiple connection units, you should configure
backup CM instances in case the primary CM instance fails.


Connection Unit Type
CLUSTER
– A high-availability cluster is a set of database servers consisting of a primary
server and one or more secondary servers. The servers in a cluster are
homogeneous; that is, all of the servers use the same hardware and software
configurations. A cluster can consist of a primary server, an HDR secondary
server, and zero or more shared disk secondary servers (SDS servers) and
zero or more remote standalone secondary servers (RSS servers).
REPLSET
– a set of database servers linked with Enterprise Replication (ER)
GRID
– any set of interconnected servers, including clusters, replicate sets, and server
sets, in an Enterprise Replication (ER) domain.
SERVERSET
– A server set is a server or group of servers that are managed by third-party
replication application. The database server must have the same database
name and schema in order for client applications to connect. The CM provides
only availability and load balancing to server sets.


Converting old file to new format
To use the latest Connection manager, you must convert the configuration files from versions
prior to 3.70.xC3 using command line options. You can use the following command to convert
the old configuration from to the new format:
$ oncmsm -c cmsm.cfg -n cmsm.cfg.new

11.70.xC1 format 11.70.xC3 format
NAME sample NAME sample
SLA sqtp=PRI LOGFILE /usr/informix/tmp/cm.log
SLA sqrt=(SDS+HDR+RSS) CLUSTER cluster1
SLA drtp=PRI {
SLA drrt=(SDS+HDR+RSS) SLA sqtp DBSERVERS=PRI
FOC SDS+HDR+RSS,0 SLA sqrt DBSERVERS=(SDS,HDR,RSS)
SLA_WORKERS 16 SLA drtp DBSERVERS=PRI
LOGFILE /usr/informix/tmp/cm.log SLA drrt DBSERVERS=(SDS,HDR,RSS)
FOC ORDER=SDS,HDR,RSS TIMEOUT=0
}


Connection Manager example
NAME cm1
MACRO NY=(ny1,ny2,ny3)
MACRO CA=(ca1,ca2,ca3)
LOG 1
LOGFILE ${INFORMIXDIR}/tmp/cm1.log
CLUSTER west # cluster name (unique in CM)
{
INFORMIXSERVER ids_w1,ids_w2
SLA oltpw DBSERVERS=primary
SLA reportw DBSERVERS=(HDR,SDS)
FOC ORDER=SDS,HDR TIMEOUT=5 RETRY=1
CMALARMPROGRAM ${INFORMIXDIR}/etc/CMALARMPROGRAM.sh
}
REPLSET erset #replset name
{
INFORMIXSERVER g_er1,g_er2
SLA repl1_any DBSERVERS=ANY # node discovery
SLA repl1_ca DBSERVERS=${CA} POLICY=WORKLOAD
SLA repl1_ny DBSERVERS=${NY}
}
GRID grid1 # grid name
{
INFORMIXSERVER node1,node2,node3
SLA grid1_any DBSERVERS=ANY POLICY=LATENCY
SLA grid1_avail DBSERVERS=${NY},${CA}
}
GRID grid2 # grid name
{
INFORMIXSERVER node4,node5
SLA grid2_any DBSERVERS=ANY POLICY=LATENCY
SLA grid2_avail DBSERVERS=${CA},${NY}
}
SERVERSET ss # name of serverset, unique in CM
{
INFORMIXSERVER ids1,ids2,ids3
SLA ssavail DBSERVERS=ids1,ids2,ids3 HOST=apollo SERVICE=9600 NETTYPE=onsoctcp
SLA ssany DBSERVERS=(ids1,ids2,ids3) HOST=apollo SERVICE=9610 NETTYPE=onsoctcp
}

Managing message logs in embedded and
enterprise environments
Use Scheduler tasks to reduce the size of message log files by
automatically truncating or deleting the log files or by configuring
automatic file rotation.

Additionally, you can use the related ph_threshold table parameters
to specify the maximum number of message log files to retain.
These tasks and parameters are useful for embedded applications
because they reduce DBA or system administrator requirements for
managing the log files.

You can also use SQL administration API commands to manage
the size of the log files on demand, as necessary.


Enabling automatic rotation
The tasks associated to each of the common log files that can be enabled
using the SQL Admin API:

File Task Default Frequency in ph_threshold
online.log online_log_rotate MAX_MSGPATH_VERSIONS
bar_act_log bar_act_log_rotate MAX_BAR_ACT_LOG_VERSIONS
bar_debug_log bar_debug_log_rotate MAX_BAR_DEBUG_LOG_VERSIONS

Enable and change frequency of rotation to 10 days:

DATABASE sysadmin;
UPDATE ph_task
SET tk_enable = “t”,
tk_frequency = INTERVAL (10) DAY TO DAY
WHERE tk_name = "online_log_rotate";


Or use OAT


SQL admin API Examples
Rotate a maximum of 52 /usr/informix/online.log files:
– execute function task("file rotate", "/usr/informix/online.log",52);
• When the database server rotates these files, the server deletes version 52 of the file. Version 51 becomes
version 52, version 50 becomes version 51, and so on. The new online log becomes version 1.
Truncate online.log:
– execute function task("file truncate", "/usr/informix/online.log");
Delete online.log:
– execute function task("file delete", "/usr/informix/online.log");
Display Status:
– execute function task("file status", "/usr/informix/online.log");

(expression) File name = /usr/informix/online.log
Is File = 1
Is Directory = 0
Is Raw Device = 0
Is Block Device = 0
Is Pipe = 0
File Size = 554
Last Access Time = 11/29/2010 21:55:02
Last Modified Time = 11/29/2010 21:51:45
Status Change Time = 11/29/2010 21:51:45
User Id = 200
Group id = 102
File Flags = 33206

New built-in SQL compatibility functions
New built-in SQL string manipulation functions.
– Returns either a character string derived from an argument to the function, or an
integer that describes a string argument:
• CHARINDEX() Returns the location of a substring within a string
• INSTR() Returns position of Nth occurrence of a substring within a string
• LEFT() Returns the leftmost N characters of a string
• LEN() Synonym for the LENGTH function
• REVERSE() Reverses the order of characters in a source string
• RIGHT() Returns the N rightmost characters from a source string
• SPACE() Returns a string of N blank characters
• SUBSTRING_INDEX() Returns a substring that includes the Nth occurrence of a delimiter

Built-in trigonometric support functions.
– Converts the units of angular measurement of a numeric expression argument
from radians into degrees, or from degrees into radians:
• DEGREES() Converts units of radians to degrees
• RADIANS() Converts units of degrees to radians

Can simplify the migration to the Informix database server of applications
developed for other database servers.


ILogin Demo


Client SDK includes ConnectTest utility

The ConnectTest utility is included in
Client SDK, Version 3.70.xC3. The utility
is installed with Client SDK or Informix
Connect on the Windows 32-bit and 64-
bit platforms. The ConnectTest utility is a
user interface that can execute SQL
queries and display the resulting data of
the executed SQL query.

Located in C:Informixbin


DB-Access included with Client-SDK
Client SDK includes the DB-Access utility!

Users now have an IBM supported server command line utility on
the client side.

– The DB-Access utility is included in IBM Informix Client Software
Development Kit (Client SDK), version 3.70.xC3

– The utility is installed with Client SDK or IBM Informix Connect only on
platforms that support IBM Informix 11.70.


Non-root installations with SHM and pipes
Non-root installations support shared-memory and stream-pipe
connections (for onipcshm and onipcstr)
– Communication files directory option (cfd)
– You can use the communication files directory option to store shared-memory or
stream-pipe connection communication files in a new location. Specifying the
communication files directory option for non-root installations of Informix is
necessary if the server and client are in different locations, and increases system
performance if the server and client are in the same location.

– The cfd option can define an absolute path or a path relative to $INFORMIXDIR for
storing communication files:
• cfd=/location defines an absolute path
• cfd=location defines a path relative to $INFORMIXDIR
– The length of the cfd path is restricted to 70 bytes. Relative-path byte lengths
include $INFORMIXDIR.

– Non-root installations of Informix do not have permission to write to the
/INFORMIXTMP directory, so shared-memory and stream-pipe connection
communication files are written to the $INFORMIXDIR/etc directory if no
communication files directory has been specified as an option in the sqlhosts file.

Grid & ER
Automatically connecting to a grid
– You can connect to a grid automatically by including the ifx_grid_connect()
procedure as part of the sysdbopen() procedure. Set the value of the
ER_enable option of the ifx_grid_connect() procedure to 2 or 3 to suppress
errors that would prevent the session from accessing the database.
CREATE PROCEDURE public.sysdbopen()
SET ISOLATION TO REPEATABLE READ;
SET ENVIRONMENT OPTCOMPIND '1';
EXECUTE PROCEDURE ifx_grid_connect('grid1', 3);
END PROCEDURE;

• ER_enable:
– 0 = Default. Replication is disabled.
– 1 = Replication is enabled.
– 2 = Replication is disabled and errors are suppressed.
– 3 = Replication is enabled and errors are suppressed

Code set conversion for Enterprise Replication (ER)
– ER supports replication between database servers that use different code sets.
• You can convert servers to the Unicode code set with minimal application downtime,
convert servers from one code set to another, and replicate data between servers in
different locales.
• You can enable replication between code sets by using the UTF8 option when
creating the replicate definition.

Enhancements to the Replication plug-in for OAT
Define one Connection Manager for multiple connection units.
– You can define a Connection Manager to manage client connection requests
for a combination of clusters, grids, replication sets, and server sets on the
Replication > Connection Manager pages.
– You can
• add connection units to a Connection Manager
• start and stop a Connection Manager
• create service level agreements (SLAs).

Replicate among multiple code sets.
– You can specify that replication can occur between code sets when you create
a template or a replicate on the Replication > Replicates pages.
• The character columns are converted to UTF-8 when a row is copied into the
transmission queue.
• When the replicated row is applied on the target server, the data is converted from
UTF-8 to the code set of the target server.


Audit log files
Retaining numbers for audit log files
Audit log file numbers are no longer reused if the database server
restarts after audit log files are removed.
The adtlog.server file in the $INFORMIXDIR/aaodir directory
maintains the number of the most recent audit log file.

The adtlog.server file saves system resources whenever the
database server restarts because the database server no longer
checks each audit log file number before assigning a number to the
new log file.


Mapped Users
Restrict operating system properties for mapped users

The operating system administrator can now use the
/etc/informix/allowed.surrogates file to control which operating
system users and groups can act as surrogates for mapped users.

– The improved control makes root installations of Informix more secure
by preventing the database security administrator from specifying
surrogates that could compromise operating system security.


Simplified handling of time series data
• Managing time series data with the Informix TimeSeries data type is easier
than in previous releases:
• Storing time series data:
• Containers for time series data are created automatically in the same dbspaces
that the table uses. Container and TimeSeries subtype names can be up to 128
bytes long. Time series tables and containers can use non-default page sizes.

• Creating a time series:
• You can use predefined calendars for a time series. You can experiment with
time series data in the stores_demo database.

• Using time series data:
• You can create virtual tables based on the results of a time series expression,
and you can use standard virtual tables to easily update data. You can also
output time series data in XML format with the TSToXML function.

• Deleting time series data:
• You can quickly delete large quantities of time series data.

Informix TimeSeries plug-in for OAT
• With the TimeSeries plug-in, you can monitor the database objects
related to your time series:

• View the TimeSeries subtypes, containers, and calendars that are used
for the time series data in a database.

• View the tables and indexes that contain TimeSeries subtypes.

• View the virtual tables that are based on tables that contain TimeSeries
subtypes.

• Monitor the percentage of the space that is used in the containers and
in the dbspaces for the containers.

• You can also create and drop containers, calendars, and virtual tables.


Informix Warehouse Accelerator v1.1
Create data mart definitions automatically
When you have a large number of tables for data warehousing, you can
use query probing to create the data mart definitions automatically. You
use stored procedures and functions to analyze your database schema
and warehouse queries and determine which tables to include in a data
mart definition. A file is created, in XML format, with the data mart
definition. You can then import this file into the administration interface to
proceed with deploying and loading the data mart.

Additional locales supported
Previously Informix Warehouse Accelerator supported only the default
locale en_us.8859-1. Additional locales are now supported.
For the Nordic countries, I found these: sv_se.8859-1 sv_se.8859-15
sv_se.utf8 sv_se.PC-Latin-1 sv_se.CP1252 sv_se.CP1252@euro
fi_fi.8859-1 fi_fi.8859-15 fi_fi.utf8 fi_fi.PC-Latin-1 fi_fi.858 fi_fi.CP1252
fi_fi.CP1252@euro da_dk.8859-1 da_dk.8859-15 da_dk.utf8 da_dk.PC-
Latin-1 da_dk.858 da_dk.CP1252 da_dk.CP1252@euro no_no.8859-1
no_no.8859-15 no_no.utf8 no_no.PC-Latin-1 no_no.CP1252
no_no.CP1252@euro

11.70.xC4 - 25th October 2011
Administration
– Enhancements to the OpenAdmin Tool (OAT)
– Enhancements to the Replication Plug-in for OAT
– Informix Health Advisor Plug-in for OAT
– Dynamically change additional configuration parameters
– Compare date and interval values
– Plan responses to high severity event alarms
– Data sampling for update statistics operations
– SQL admin API command arguments for creating sbspaces
– Monitor client program database usage
– Progress of compression operations

High availability and Enterprise Replication
– Easier setup of faster consistency checking
– Handle Connection Manager event alarms
– Easier startup of Connection Manager
– Prevent failover if the primary server is active
– Configure secure connections for replication servers

Security
– Global Security Kit (GSKit) support
– Use a file to authenticate server connections in a secured network environment

Time Series data
– TimeSeries Plug-in for Data Studio
– Delete a range of elements and free empty pages from a time series
– Aggregate time series data across multiple rows

OAT News
Install OpenAdmin Tool (OAT) for Informix when you install Informix
Client SDK.
– When you install the Client SDK, or when you install the Informix
software bundle and select Client SDK or Informix Connect, you can
install OAT.
This option is available on Windows 32-bit, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit, and
MAC OS 64-bit operating systems.
Previously, OAT was available only as a separate download package.

Add and manage users without operating system accounts (UNIX,
Linux).
– You can add internally authenticated users and users who do not have
accounts on the host operating system on the Server Administration >
User Privileges > Internal Users page.
– You can specify whether the users can access the database server and
whether they can have administrative privileges.
– These actions require Informix 11.70.

Informix Health Advisor Plug-in for OAT
Analyzes the state of Informix database servers.
– The Health Advisor plug-in contains a series of alarms that check
conditions on the database server, including configuration, operating
system, performance, storage, and Enterprise Replication. The Health
Advisor plug-in creates a report of the results and recommendations
and sends the report by email to the specified recipients.

With the Health Advisor plug-in, you can:
– Create profiles that specify the alarms that are enabled and the
thresholds for the alarms.
– Schedule tasks to run the Health Advisor with specific profiles at regular
intervals.
– Specify who receives an email notification of the results.
– Run a check on demand with the current profile and view the report.


Enhancements to the Replication Plug-in for OAT
Administer Enterprise Replication, the Connection Manager, and
grids for multibyte database locales.
– You can view data in any database locale that Informix database
servers support when you are using the Replication plug-in, including
the Enterprise Replication, Connection Manager, and Grid pages.
– For example, you can access a database that has an Italian or a
Japanese locale.
– Previously, the OAT pages supported non-English locales, but the
Replication plug-in did not.
– Support for multibyte database locales in the Replication plug-in
requires Informix 11.70.xC4.


Dynamically change additional configuration
parameters

In past releases you could dynamically change some configuration
parameters with the onmode -wf or onmode -wm commands. As of
this fix pack, you can use those commands to dynamically change
these additional configurations parameters:
– ALARMPROGRAM, AUTO_REPREPARE, BLOCKTIMEOUT,
CKPTINTVL, DBSPACETEMP, DEADLOCK_TIMEOUT,
DEF_TABLE_LOCKMODE, DIRECTIVES, DRINTERVAL,
DRTIMEOUT, FILLFACTOR, LOGSIZE, LTAPEBLK, LTAPEDEV,
LTAPESIZE, MSGPATH, ONDBSPACEDOWN, OPTCOMPIND,
RA_PAGES, SHMADD, STACKSIZE, SYSALARMPROGRAM,
TAPEBLK, TAPEDEV, TAPESIZE, TBLTBLFIRST, TBLTBLNEXT,
TXTIMEOUT, and WSTATS.


onmode –wm/wf changeable
ADMIN_MODE_USERS EXPLAIN_STAT RESIDENT
ALARMPROGRAM FILLFACTOR RSS_FLOW_CONTROL
AUTO_AIOVPS HA_ALIAS RTO_SERVER_RESTART
AUTO_CKPTS IFX_EXTEND_ROLE S6_USE_REMOTE_SERVER_CFG
AUTO_LRU_TUNING IFX_FOLDVIEW SBSPACENAME
AUTO_READAHEAD LIMITNUMSESSIONS SBSPACETEMP
AUTO_REPREPARE LISTEN_TIMEOUT SDS_TIMEOUT
AUTO_STAT_MODE LOG_INDEX_BUILDS SHMADD
BAR_CKPTSEC_TIMEOUT LOG_STAGING_DIR SMX_COMPRESS
BATCHEDREAD_TABLE LOGSIZE SP_AUTOEXPAND
BATCHEDREAD_INDEX LOW_MEMORY_MGR SP_THRESHOLD
BLOCKTIMEOUT LOW_MEMORY_RESERVE SP_WAITTIME
CDR_DELAY_PURGE_DTC LTAPEBLK SQL_LOGICAL_CHAR
CDR_LOG_LAG_ACTION LTAPEDEV STACKSIZE
CDR_LOG_STAGING_MAXSIZE LTAPESIZE STATCHANGE
CKPTINTVL LTXEHWM STOP_APPLY
DBSPACETEMP LTXHWM SYSALARMPROGRAM
DEADLOCK_TIMEOUT MAX_INCOMPLETE_CONNECTIONS SYSSBSPACENAME
DEF_TABLE_LOCKMODE MAX_PDQPRIORITY TAPEBLK
DELAY_APPLY MSG_DATE TAPEDEV
DIRECTIVES MSGPATH TAPESIZE
DRINTERVAL NET_IO_TIMEOUT_ALARM TBLTBLFIRST
DRTIMEOUT NS_CACHE TBLTBLNEXT
DS_MAX_QUERIES ONDBSPACEDOWN TEMPTAB_NOLOG
DS_MAX_SCANS ONLIDX_MAXMEM TXTIMEOUT
DS_NONPDQ_QUERY_MEM OPTCOMPIND USELASTCOMMITTED
DS_TOTAL_MEMORY RA_PAGES USTLOW_SAMPLE
DUMPCNT REMOTE_SERVER_CFG VP_MEMORY_CACHE_KB
DUMPSHMEM REMOTE_USERS_CFG WSTATS
DYNAMIC_LOGS
ENABLE_SNAPSHOT

Datablade API - date/interval comparison
Compare date and interval values
– You can compare the values of two DATETIME data types or the
values of two INTERVAL data types to determine if the first value is
before, after, or the same as the second value.

mi_integer mi_interval_compare(
– mi_interval *inv1,
– mi_interval *inv2,
– mi_integer *result)

mi_integer mi_datetime_compare(
– mi_datetime *dtime1,
– mi_datetime *dtime2,
– mi_integer *result)


Plan responses to high severity event alarms
Using ALARMPROGRAM to Capture Events
– On UNIX, use the alarmprogram.sh and on Windows, use the
alarmprogram.bat shell script, for handling event alarms and starting automatic
log backups.
– You can now plan responses to severity 4 and 5 event alarms based on the
documented explanations and user actions.
Severity 4 example:
Class ID:1 Event ID: 1009 Class message:Table failure: 'dbname:"owner".tabname'
Specific message:
Page Check Error in object
The database server detected inconsistencies while checking a page that was being read into internal buffers.
Online log: Assertion failure or assertion warning with a description of the problem.
Server state: Online or offline, depending on how serious the problem is.
User action: Follow the suggestions in the online log. Typically, run the oncheck -cD command on the table
mentioned in the class message or on the database.
Severity 5 example:
Class ID:6 Event ID: 6041 Class message:Internal subsystem failure: 'message'
Specific message:
An internal error was detected by the Buffer Manager in the database server.
The database server buffer manager encountered an internal error and either shut down or corrected the problem.
Online log: Assertion warning or an assertion failure with a description of the operation being performed at the time
of the error. Typically, an assertion warning shows that the error was internally corrected.
Server State: Offline if the error was unrecoverable. Online if the error was corrected.
User action: If the error was unrecoverable, start the database server and try the operation again. If the operation
fails again, note all circumstances and contact IBM Software Support. No action is required if the error was
internally corrected by the database server.


SQL administration API command arguments for creating
sbspaces
Three SQL administration API command arguments were added:
– create tempsbspace : creates temporary sbspace that has a size of 20
MB with an offset of 0:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task ("create
tempsbspace","tempsbspace3",
"$INFORMIXDIR/WORK/tempsbspace3","20 M","0");

– create sbspace with log: creates sbspace that have transaction logging
turned on that has a size of 20 MB with an offset of 0:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task ("create sbspace with
log","sbspace2",
"$INFORMIXDIR/WORK/sbspace2","20 M","0");

– create sbspace with accesstime: creates sbspaces that track the time
of access for all smart large objects stored in the sbspace:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task ("create sbspace with
accesstime","sbspace4",
"$INFORMIXDIR/WORK/sbspace4","20 M","0");

Performance of Update Statistics low
Previously, updating statistics for an index in the Low mode
requires a complete index traversal to gather the necessary
statistics such as number of pages, number of unique keys, degree
of clustering of data, etc, for the optimizer to generate accurate
query plans.
– For very large indexes this can take a significant amount of time.
This feature will use sampling resulting in significantly reducing the
amount of data and time required to generate the statistics, thus
improving performance.
– Has little to no impact to the accuracy of optimizer parameters

Currently a 1 billion row table with 8 indexes takes 63 hrs to
generate the necessary statistics, and a 1.4 billion row table with 4
indexes took about 27 hrs.
This new feature will bring the time taken down to few minutes
each!

Data sampling for update statistics
If you have a large index with more than 100 000 leaf pages, you
can generate index statistics based on sampling when you run
UPDATE STATISTICS statements in LOW mode.
– Gathering index statistics from sampled data can increase the speed of
the update statistics operations.

To enable sampling, set the USTLOW_SAMPLE configuration
parameter or the USTLOW_SAMPLE option of the SET
ENVIRONMENT statement or use onmode –wm/wf.

Range of values
– 0 = disable sampling (default!)
– 1 = enable sampling


Monitoring – path of client
Monitor client program database usage
– You can use the onstat -g ses sessionid command to display the full
path of the client program that is used in your session.

$ onstat -g ses 53
session effective #RSAM total used dynamic
id user user tty pid hostname threads memory memory explain
53 informix - 36 18638 apollo11 1 73728 63048 off
Program :
/usr/informix/bin/dbaccess
tid name rstcb flags curstk status
77 sqlexec 4636ba20 Y--P--- 4240 cond wait sm_read -
Memory pools count 1
name class addr totalsize freesize #allocfrag #freefrag
53 V 4841d040 73728 10680 84 6
...


Monitoring – progress of compression
Enhanced output of onstat -g dsk
– “Approx Prog” and ”Approx Remaining” added.
# output for a compress operation
$ onstat -g dsk
Rows Approx Approx
Partnum OP Processed Cur Page Prog Duration Remaining Table
0x00100196 COMPRESS 63253 3515 75% 00:00:03 00:00:01 footab

# output for a repack operation
$ onstat -g dsk
Rows Approx Approx
Partnum OP Processed Cur Page Prog Duration Remaining Table
0x00100196 REPACK 22900 4285 28% 00:00:01 00:00:02 footab

OP Compression operation, such as compress, repack, or shrink.
Processed Number of rows processed so far for the specified operation
Curr Page The current page number that the server is operating on now
Approx Prog Percentage of the total operation that has completed
Duration The number of seconds that have elapsed since the operation started
Approx Remaining The approximate time that remains before the operation is complete


Faster consistency checking
Easier setup of faster consistency checking
– When you increase the speed of consistency checking by creating an
index on the ifx_replcheck shadow column, you no longer need to
include the conflict resolution shadow columns in the replicated table. In
the CREATE TABLE statement, the WITH REPLCHECK keywords do
not require the WITH CRCOLS keywords.
– To index the ifx_replcheck shadow column, create a unique index
based on the existing primary key columns and the ifx_replcheck
column.
– For example, the following statement creates an index on a table
named customer on the primary key column id and ifx_replcheck:

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX customer_index ON customer(id,
ifx_replcheck);


Prevent SDS failover if the primary server is active
Use the SDS_LOGCHECK parameter to determine whether the primary
server is generating log activity and to allow or prevent failover of the
primary server
– If your system has I/O fencing configured, and if an SD secondary server
becomes a primary server, the I/O fencing script must prevent the failed primary
server from updating any of the shared disks. If the system does not have I/O
fencing configured, the SDS_LOGCHECK configuration parameter prevents the
occurrence of multiple primary servers by not failing over to the SD secondary
server if the original primary server is generating log records.
– For example, if the SDS_LOGCHECK parameter is set to 10, and the primary
server fails, the SD secondary server waits up to 10 seconds to either detect that
the primary server is generating log records (in which case failover is prevented),
or the SD secondary server detects that the primary is not generating log records
and failover occurs
Settings:
0 = Do not detect log activity; allow failover.
n = Wait up to n seconds. If log activity is detected from the primary server, failover is
prevented; otherwise, failover is allowed.


Connection Manager enhancements
Easier startup of Connection Manager
– If you set the CMCONFIG environment variable to the path and file name of the
Connection Manager configuration file, you can start, stop, and restart the
Connection Manager without specifying the configuration file.
– The configuration file specifies service level agreements and other Connection Manager
configuration options.
• If the CMCONFIG environment variable is not set and the configuration file name is
not specified on the oncmsm utility command line, the Connection Manager attempts
to load the file from the following path and file name: $INFORMIXDIR/etc/cmsm.cfg

Handle Connection Manager event alarms
– You can use the values of the INFORMIXCMNAME and
INFORMIXCMCONUNITNAME environment variables when writing an alarm
handler for the Connection Manager. If the Connection Manager raises an
event alarm, the Connection Manager instance name is stored in the
INFORMIXCMNAME environment variable, and the Connection Manager
connection unit name is stored in the INFORMIXCMCONUNITNAME
environment variable.
• automatically created and set by the Connection Manager and you must not set or
modify them.


Security - secure connections for replication
Configure secure connections for replication servers
– You can use the connection security option in the sqlhosts file and
create an encrypted password file so that the Connection Manager and
the CDR (ER) utility can securely connect to networked servers. Use the
onpassword utility to encrypt or decrypt a password file.
– The input file is an ASCII text file with the following structure:
• Server_or_group AlternateServer UserName Password

– The file contains the server names, user names, and passwords that
must be specified in order to connect to the appropriate server.
AlternateServer specifies the name of an alternate server to connect
with in case the connection cannot be made to ServerName.

– To encrypt a file named passwords.txt by using a key named EncryptKey and
place the encrypted file in $INFORMIXDIR/etc/passwd_file:
• onpassword -k EncryptKey -e ./passwords.txt


Security – S6_REMOTE_SERVER_CFG
Use a file to authenticate server connections in a secured network
environment
– You can use the S6_USE_REMOTE_SERVER_CFG parameter with
the REMOTE_SERVER_CFG parameter to specify the file that is used
to authenticate connections in a secured network environment.
range of values
0 = The $INFORMIXDIR/etc/hosts.equiv file is used to authenticate servers
connecting through a secure port.
1 = The file specified by the REMOTE_SERVER_CFG configuration
parameter is used to authenticate servers connecting through a secure port

• The file specified by the REMOTE_SERVER_CFG configuration
parameter must be located in $INFORMIXDIR/etc. If the
configuration parameter is set, then the specified file is used instead
of the $INFORMIXDIR/etc/hosts.equiv file.


Security - GSKIT_VERSION
Global Security Kit (GSKit) support
– The GSKit is used by the database server for encryption and SSL
communication.
– GSKit version 8 is installed with Informix® 11.70 and IBM Client
Software Development Kit (Client SDK) version 3.70. GSKit 8 is used
by default; however, if you have another supported, major version of
GSKit software installed on your computer, you can set the
GSKIT_VERSION parameter so that the database server uses the
other version.
– GSKit 8 includes the GSKCapiCmd command-line interface for
managing keys, certificates, and certificate requests.
– The iKeyman utility and GSKCmd command-line interface can also be
used to manage keys, certificates, and certificate requests, but are a
part of IBM JRE 1.6 or later, instead of GSKit 8.


Time series
IBM Informix TimeSeries Plug-in for Data Studio
– You can easily load data from an input file into an Informix table with a
TimeSeries column by using IBM Informix TimeSeries Plug-in for Data
Studio. You can also use the plug-in with IBM Optim(TM) Developer
Studio.

Delete a range of elements and free empty pages from a time
series
– You can delete elements in a time series from a specified time range
and free any resulting empty pages by using the DelRange function.
The DelRange function is similar to the DelTrim function; however,
unlike the DelTrim function, the DelRange function frees pages in any
part of the range of deleted elements. You can free empty pages that
have only null elements from a time series for a specified time range or
throughout the time series by using the NullCleanup function.


Time series
Aggregate time series data across multiple rows

– You can use a single TimeSeries function, TSRollup, to aggregate time
series values by time for multiple rows in the table and return a time
series that contains the results. Previously, you could aggregate time
series values only for each row individually.

– For example, if you have a table that contains information about energy
consumption for the meters attached to a specific energy concentrator,
you can aggregate the values for all the meters and sum the values for
specific time intervals to get a single total for each interval. The
resulting time series represents the total energy consumption for each
time interval for that energy concentrator.


Informix Growth Warehouse Edition
IBM Informix Growth Warehouse Edition:
– IBM Informix Growth Edition
– IBM Informix Warehouse Accelerator
IBM Informix Growth Warehouse Edition V11.7 provides:
– Faster query response times on unpredictable and long-running query
workloads
– Help in lowering operating costs by reducing database tuning efforts
– Improved performance on analytical queries compared to your existing Informix
environment
– The ability to run mixed workloads

IBM Informix Growth Warehouse Edition can be deployed on a physical
server that has 16 cores or less. IWA can be configured for a maximum of
48 gigabytes of memory. IWA component compresses data in memory and
can, therefore, potentially hold up to 250 gigabytes of raw table data.


Install Informix Warehouse Accelerator on a
cluster system
You can now install IWA on a cluster system. Using a cluster for
IWA takes advantage of the parallel processing power of multiple
cluster nodes.
The accelerator coordinator node and each worker node can run on
a different cluster node.
IWA software and data are shared in the cluster file system.
You can administer IWA from any node in the cluster


Refresh data mart data during query
acceleration
You can now refresh data in IWA while queries are accelerated.
– You no longer need to suspend query acceleration in order to drop
and re-create the original data mart.
1. Using the existing administrator tools, you create a new data mart that
has the same data mart definition as the original data mart, but has a
different name.
2. You can then load the new data mart while query acceleration still
uses the original data mart.
3. After the new data mart is loaded, the accelerator automatically uses
the new data mart with the latest data to accelerate queries.


IWA – ondwa / new functions / AQTs
User informix can run the ondwa commands
– The ondwa commands can now be run by user informix provided that
the shell limits are set correctly. root was needed previously.

Support for new functions is implemented
– DECODE
– NVL
– TRUNC

New options for monitoring AQTs (accelerated query tables)
– New columns have been added to the output of the onstat -g aqt
command that include counters for candidate AQTs.


JDBC 4.1 compliance
Support for metadata functions for JDBC 4.1 compliance for
the JCC data driver
– In DB2 ver 9.7.fp5 JCC plans to support the JDBC 4.1 specifications.
According to the specifications, there is additional column level
metadata information that is needed from the server side. On the
Informix side this epic is intended to address all such metadata
changes for JCC. All internal C/R related changes were already done
during the 11.70xC3 time frame.


11.70.xC5 – eGA May 24 - 2012
Administration
– Plan responses to medium-severity and low-severity event alarms
– IFX_BATCHEDREAD_INDEX environment option
– Reserve space for BYTE and TEXT data in round-robin fragments.
Application development
– Improvement to the keyword analyzer for basic text searching
– Increased SQL statement length
– Enhanced query performance
– The Change Data Capture API sample program
Enterprise Replication
– Replication errors on leaf nodes
Global language support
– Scan strings with the ifx_gl_complen() function
Time Series:
– Count the time-series elements that match expression criteria
– Remove old time-series data from containers
– New operators for aggregating across time-series values
Informix Warehouse Accelerator
– Refresh data quickly without reloading the whole data mart
– Use high-availability secondary servers to accelerate queries
– New options added for the use_dwa environment variable
– Support for new functions is implemented
– Support for the Solaris Intel x64 operating system added

Plan responses
Plan responses to medium-severity and low-severity event
alarms
– You can plan responses to severity 3, 2, and 1 event alarms for alarms
with documented explanations and user actions.


IFX_BATCHEDREAD_INDEX environment
Onconfig setting BATCHEDREAD_INDEX was introduced in
11.70.xC1 to control whether the optimizer automatically fetches a
set of keys from an index buffer for a session.

Use the IFX_BATCHEDREAD_INDEX environment option of the
SET ENVIRONMENT statement to enable/disable it for a specific
session.

Specify:
– '1' to enable the optimizer to automatically fetch a set of keys from an
index buffer
– '0' to disable the automatic fetching of keys from an index buffer
Example:
– SET ENVIRONMENT IFX_BATCHEDREAD_INDEX '1';


Improvement to the keyword analyzer for
basic text searching (BTS)
You can specify that the keyword analyzer removes trailing white
spaces from input text and queries so that you do not need to
specify the exact number of white spaces to query words in
variable-length data types.
– Add the .rt suffix to the keyword analyzer name when you create the bts
index.

White spaces are indexed. Queries for text that includes white
spaces must escape each white space by a backslash () character.
If the analyzer name is keyword.rt, BTS removes trailing white
spaces during indexing and querying.


Increased SQL statement length
Previously, SQL statements and SPL routines were restricted to 64
KB in length.
– Automated query generation program, such as Cognos, generates
large statements (with multiple nested derived tables) and has run into
the 64KB limit.

The maximum length of SQL statements and is now 4 GB!
The only exception is the length of the CREATE VIEW statement,
which is restricted to 2 MB in length.
The extended length is valid when using Client SDK 3.70.xC5 and
JDBC 3.70.xC5.


Enhanced query performance
When a SELECT statement is sent from a Java program to an
Informix database, the returned rows, or tuples, are stored in a
tuple buffer in Informix JDBC Driver. The default size of the tuple
buffer is the larger of the returned tuple size or 4096 bytes.
You can now set the maximum size of the fetch buffer to 2 GB to
increase query performance and to reduce network traffic.

setenv FET_BUF_SIZE bytes

The greater the size of the buffer, the more rows can be returned,
and the less frequently the client application must wait while the
database server returns rows.
A large buffer can improve performance by reducing the overhead
of filling the client-side buffer.
Max was previously 32767, now it is 2147483648 bytes.


The Change Data Capture (CDC) API sample
program
The Change Data Capture API sample program, cdcapi.ec, is
included in the INFORMIXDIR/demo/cdc directory.
In previous releases, you had to copy the program from the
documentation.


Replication errors on leaf nodes
Because leaf servers have limited information about other
replication servers, the syscdrerror tables on leaf nodes no longer
contain replication errors for other replication servers.


Scan strings with the ifx_gl_complen()
function
The ifx_gl_complen() function scans input strings faster than using
the ifx_gl_mblen() function alone.
The ifx_gl_complen() function returns the length in bytes of the
initial part of an input string that matches a collating element, or
returns 0 if the initial part of the string is not a collation sequence.
#include <gls.h>
int ifx_gl_complen(gl_lc_t lc, gl_mchar_t *input)


PN_STAGEBLOB_THRESHOLD
Use the PN_STAGEBLOB_THRESHOLD configuration parameter
to reserve space for BYTE and TEXT data in round-robin
fragments.
Set this configuration parameter to the typical or average size of the
BYTE or TEXT data that is stored in the table.
When a table reaches the maximum number of pages for a
fragment, more pages can be added to the table by adding a new
fragment. However, if a table contains BYTE or TEXT columns and
that table is fragmented by the round-robin distribution scheme,
adding a new fragment does not automatically enable new rows to
be inserted into the new fragment.

PN_STAGEBLOB_THRESHOLD 0 # default
range of values 0 to 1000000
units Kilobytes


Time Series
Count the time-series elements that match expression criteria
– You can count the number of elements in a time series that match the
criteria of a simple arithmetic expression by running the CountIf
function. For example, you can count the number of null elements.

Remove old time-series data from containers
– You can remove the oldest time-series data through an end date in one
or more containers for multiple time-series instances by running the
TSContainerPurge function. You can then reuse the space for new
data.

New operators for aggregating across time-series values
– You can return the first or last elements entered into the database for
each timepoint by using the FIRST or LAST operators in the TSRollup
function.


IWA - Refresh data quickly without reloading
Refresh data quickly without reloading the whole data mart
– By using the dropPartMart() and loadPartMart() functions, you can
drop and load a table partition in Informix Warehouse Accelerator.
–
In previous versions of IWA if the data on the database server changes, you
must reload the entire data mart.
Now you can selectively refresh the partitions and load the new data more
quickly.

– For example, if you have a terabyte-size data warehouse already
loaded in IWA and 10 GB of the data changes in certain partitions, you
can reload only the changed data.


IWA: Use high-availability secondary servers
to accelerate queries
You can now use high-availability secondary servers to create data
marts, load data, and accelerate queries.
By using secondary servers for IWA, you have greater flexibility in a
mixed-workload environment.
For example, you can dedicate the primary server for OLTP
transactions and use a secondary server for processing the
warehouse analytic queries.
By using secondary servers for IWA, you can increase the
availability and the throughput for all the servers in the high-
availability cluster.
High-availability secondary servers include shared-disk (SD)
secondary servers, high-availability data replication (HDR)
secondary servers, and remote stand-alone (RS) secondary
servers.

Example config HDR is set to access and use IWA just for the benefit of
achieving extreme query acceleration for its users, so it
Primary and SDS transparently offloads matching heavy queries to IWA, but do
fully dedicated to not deploy or maintain IWA data marts.
OLTP workloads,
not using IWA
since their clients
most probably do
not need to

RSS used to create and load/refresh different data marts into IWA,
and it can also accelerate queries for its clients using IWA


IWA: New options added for use_dwa
The use_dwa environment variable includes new options for
controlling the database client connection to the Informix database
server.
You can now specify settings for a particular session, control
whether queries are run by the Informix database server if they
cannot be accelerated by IWA, and specify a debugging file other
than the default online.log file.
set environment use_dwa 'accelerate on';
set environment use_dwa 'probe cleanup';
set environment use_dwa 'accelerate on';
set environment use_dwa 'fallback off';
set environment use_dwa 'probe on';
set environment use_dwa 'debug on';
set environment use_dwa 'debug file /tmp/my_debug_file';
set environment use_dwa 'debug on';
set environment use_dwa 'debug file /tmp/myDwaDebugFile';
select ... { query 1 }
set environment use_dwa 'debug file';
select ... { query 2 }

IWA: Support Solaris Intel x64 / new functions
Solaris Intel x64 operating system
added
– Now query acceleration for
database servers on Solaris
Intel/AMD x64

Support for additional functions is
implemented
– LEN / LENGTH
– SUBSTR / SUBSTRING
– TODAY
– TRIM
– YEAR
– UNITS
– COUNT (DISTINCT CASE …)
– Multiple DISTINCT with aggregates,
such as COUNT (DISTINCT…)

Which .Net provider should I install?
Starting with IBM Informix Version 11.70.xC5, use the DB2 .NET
Provider with your Informix installation. For information about the
DB2 .NET Provider, see
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/topic/com.ibm.swg.im
.dbclient.adonet.doc/doc/c0010960.html.

The DB2 .NET Provider is part of the Data Server Driver. You can
download the Data Server Driver from
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=4020&uid=swg27016878.


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