Since January 2026 the new Informix release v14.10xC13 is available. Besides the usual bug fixes it offers some new interesting functionalities as follows:

AC_DBSPACE made optional

The archecker utility can restore tables with SmartLOB columns (BLOB, CLOB) from a backup. If no attach tables exist, Informix must automatically recreate them. This is where AC_DBSPACE comes in. Informix uses the Dbspace defined in AC_DBSPACE as the target for these new attach tables. AC_DBSPACE specifies a list of database spaces that the archecker utility uses during backup verification. AC_DBSPACE determines where archecker creates the internal attach tables for SmartLOBs if they are missing during the restore or need to be recreated. If this parameter is missing, the verification fails. In this case, all database spaces must be specified manually for a complete backup verification.

Direct I/O now supports also 2k- and 4k block size

Direct I/O in Informix is ​​used with Cooked Files to perform database I/O directly between Informix and storage, bypassing the operating system filesystem cache. The goal is improved performance, more stable behavior, and the avoidance of duplicate caching. Direct I/O is used for DbSpaces/Chunks, among other things. However, not every filesystem supports Direct I/O

STRING_TRUNCATE_ERROR

You can set STRING_TRUNCATE_ERROR onconfig parameter OR STRING_TRUNCATE_ERROR session environment option to control how string insertions (using DML statements INSERT, UPDATE, MERGE) are handled when their values exceed the column length in a non-ANSI database. Use the STRING_TRUNCATE_ERROR configuration parameter or STRING_TRUNCATE_ERROR session environment option to either generate an error -1279 Value exceeds string column length or to silently truncate the string without reporting an error.