Handy tips for the daily Informix use

ONSTAT-options for analysis

Sometimes not the big features make your day with Informix more productive and smoother. Often practical improvements come along soft-footed and in a simple manner, wondering how easy things can be ... . In the following we would like to give you some recommendations for improving your Informix 14.10 database by well informed usage of the ONSTAT commands.

• „ONSTAT“ commands offer many options to get valuable information about your instance. Analyzing  the behavior of  the database server  in many cases it is necessary to repeat outputs. Using the option “-r” (onstat –r  <interval>) this is performed automatically. By default this is done every 5 seconds. The interval can be adapted down to 1 second which is the minimum value. In v14.10 the value can defined as decimal value. Consequently outputs can be repeated down to 0.01 (1/100 second)
• From Informix version 14.10 xC5 on a new Date-Time-Format „YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS “ has been added to the ONSTAT outputs. This option shows exactly the time the “onstat” output was generated. Mostly there is a time gap between the time of analysis and the time of the output. To assure that results of onstat outputs are expressive it is mandatory to reconsider all actions (queries, scripts, scans …) during the time of generating the output. Insofar this simple but very worthwile option offers a noticeable support for the analysis of an Informix database instance
• In order to identify performance bottlenecks from version 14.10xC4 on Informix offers you the additional option „top“ for your onstat –g. “Top” identifies bottlenecks in a running systems in the fields of CPU, I/O and Memory usage. You can configure the number of elements (Threads, Sessions, Chunks , Spaces, Memory, Partitions, Tables) , the interval in seconds and how often the output is repeated
• The new parameter PARTITION_NAMES shows  you the name of corresponding object. Before you were informed only about the partition number. The configuration parameter can be set to 0 or 1 (default). This feature improves the usability significantly