Administering Informix Dynamic Server: Building the Foundation - Softcover

Doe, Carlton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158347076X ISBN 13: 9781583470763

Verlag: MC Press, LLC, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Geared towards database server administrators who need to get a server up and running in a short amount of time, this guide focuses on the basic skills required to administer and maintain the Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) data server. Each of the major functional areas of the database server are reviewed, including designing, initializing, monitoring, building availability layers, securing data, and the data processing environment. This book reviews how the IDS works, how to install it, how to configure a database environment, back up, recovery, and includes an introduction to monitoring instance operations, making it useful to current IDS users who need to upgrade from earlier versions of the data server as well as those who have never used IDS before.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carlton Doe was a data server administrator and 4GL developer for Informix for more than 10 years and is currently a senior certified consulting IT specialist for IBM. He cofounded the International Informix Users Group and served as its president and on its board of directors for several years. He is the author of Administering Informix Dynamic Server on Windows NT and Informix-OnLine Dynamic Server Handbook. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

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Administering Informix Dynamic Server

Building the Foundation

By Carlton Doe

MC Press

Copyright © 2008 Carlton Doe
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-58347-076-3

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Foreword, 
About This Book, 
1 - Introduction to Informix Dynamic Server, 
2 - An Introduction to Extensibility, 
3 - Preparing for Initialization, 
4 - Installing and Initializing IDS, 
5 - Basic Administrative Tasks, 
6 - Building a Database Environment, 
7 - Backing Up and Restoring, 
8 - Monitoring the Instance, 
Appendix, 
MC PRESS on line, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Informix Dynamic Server

In this Chapter

* Understanding the server's architecture

* Definition of key terms

By virtue of the fact that you're reading this book, either you are new to Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) or you're migrating from an earlier version of the data server and want to know how to use and manage the new functionality available to you. In either case, you're in for a good learning experience. There's a lot involved in understanding how this database server operates and how to make it perform in your particular environment.

The intent of this book is to make the learning process easier by distilling for you what you really need to know to configure, run, and tune a database environment using Informix Dynamic Server. Although at first glance IDS may seem similar to other data server products, this server is in fact unlike any other. It won't take you long to see that IDS is far more advanced technologically as well as more stable, easier to administer, and more robust than competing servers.

IDS 11, the focus of this book, is both very much like earlier versions of the product and also radically different. Version 11 incorporates significant new technology built on a completely modified server architecture introduced with IDS 9.1. Yet for all the changes, the server is still managed and operates as before — in many cases, it's even easier to administer!

Today's IDS is not a "regular" data server as many people might classify it; rather, it is an "object-relational" server. IDS includes high -performance core server technology developed in the early 1990s to take advantage of emerging symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and massively parallel processing (MPP) technology, and it has been continually enhanced since then. The biggest enhancement was the addition of object -oriented database functionality throughout the server in 1995. This feature completely changed how DBAs and application developers can and should model and use data within their databases and applications. IDS now offers many more tools and options than the standard, relational-only data servers.

This chapter introduces the architecture of the data server and its three main components. We'll also go over some key terminology that is either unique to Informix Dynamic Server or has a new or different meaning when used with this product. By the end of the chapter, you should understand why the product has the name it does, what a thread is, and what the fundamental components of the data server are.

This book assumes you have some level of familiarity with the SQL language and with standard relational and object-oriented database concepts. However, we won't engage in a heavy bits-and-bytes discussion. If you need that level of detail, consult the documentation accompanying your distribution of the software or visit IBM's Informix Web site.

What Is Informix Dynamic Server?

Informix Dynamic Server is a data server — or, to use a marketing buzzword, an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS). The server can work both with "standard" (or relational) data types, such as character and numeric values, and with object-oriented data types. This new technology is an extension to the ability the server has had for years to store nonnumeric or non-ASCII data in binary large objects (BLOBs). Today, IDS can do more than just write the binary stream to disk as it does with simple BLOBs. Using the appropriate functions, you can not only store the data "object" but also manipulate, search, alter, and correlate it; you can execute any operation against it that makes sense for the data and is provided by the function. This new functionality and associated data type support is commonly referred to as extensibility and extensible data types.

In general terms, though, the server's job is to provide an environment whereby data can be stored, retrieved, changed, and deleted in such a way that data itself is not lost, compromised, or modified outside the rules established by the data server or the database administrator. IDS contains both logical and physical mechanisms to accomplish these tasks.

From a logical point of view, IDS provides the ability to set rules and conditions governing not only the acceptable range of values for a column in a table but also where a row will be stored on disk. You can specify the conditions that must exist for data elements in the row to be modified or deleted. You can set up procedures to be invoked automatically and execute specific database actions to enforce still other rules when data in a table or column is added, modified, or deleted.

From a physical point of view, IDS keeps a series of logs that record changes made to data as they occur and provides a locking mechanism you can use to ensure that data requested by one user session can't be changed or deleted by another. The data server can create copies, in whole or in part, of database environments, either within the same physical server or on a separate server, to minimize the impact of a physical server failure, to distribute/collect data between database environments, to enable load balancing, or to provide continuous availability of data services. Last, IDS provides the ability to create backups of database environments that can be used to restore some or all of a database environment should a mechanical failure or user error occur. You can even configure the restore to stop at a specific point in time so the user error doesn't recur, permitting full data recovery up to the moment the operation took place. Other recently added functionality enables restoring a backup created on one physical server to another physical server even if the second server isn't using the same operating system (O/S).

Built on the widely heralded Dynamic Scalable Architecture (DSA), the IDS data server was designed to run on, and take advantage of, today's computer systems with multiple physical CPUs and larger memory stores. In fact, field studies have shown that as more physical resources (e.g., CPUs) are added to the system, IDS performance increases linearly.

Central to the design of DSA and its functionality is a concept called process parallelization, or the processing of compatible tasks in parallel. The general SQL-processing mechanism of the data server is built to work in smaller, discrete steps. These steps are allocated across the CPU resources so that they occur more or less simultaneously, or in parallel. Figure 1.1 shows how this process works from a conceptual point of view.

The figure illustrates how a query might be executed in parallel. At the beginning of the process, a series of disk reads occurs. The results from this step, and from every other in the process, are passed in real time up the processing ladder of functional operations. At each...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MC Press, LLC
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 158347076X
• ISBN 13: 9781583470763
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 424
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar