Can you clean and remove chunks from Large dbspace.

Question folks! I'm helping an old associate try to clean and purge his informix system. He is running 7.30.UC5 on an HP 9000/800. Currently they have 4 production databases as well as a few tiny test datases. The problem arises with how they've setup their system. They currently have only 2 dbspaces.. root and data. "data" contains all databases. It's appx 12 gig in size and uses all of their logical volumes for the instance. My question is, If I can move data off a specific chunk, can I drop the chunck so that I can re-use that disk to create a proper dbspace?? They will not buy more disk. Or I'd try to slowly move it over. My only other choice is to try and do a dbexport to tape. drop the whole data dbspace, edit the schema of each database and create new dbspaces on the disk... Any ideas would be great!! Thanks Ken

Check fragmentation of the tables within and the location of the larger tables. Perhaps you can pull a "rob peter to pay paul" to manuever things around. It all depends on what you mean by purge ... deleting tables they no longer need or databases they no longer need. It will all depend upon the physical layout of the data on the hard drives and the size of the chunks assigned. Of course, you should also look at what indices have been detached and see if you can drop them for some space, recreating the indices later. Of course, you may look at other systems upon which you can create a temporary informix database and perform some "insert into ... select * from" exercises to move then relocate back some of the larger tables. Hope the ideas help. Clifton "Phillips, Ken" <ken.phillips@transamerica.com> wrote: Question folks! I'm helping an old associate try to clean and purge his informix system. He is running 7.30.UC5 on an HP 9000/800. Currently they have 4 production databases as well as a few tiny test datases. The problem arises with how they've setup their system. They currently have only 2 dbspaces.. root and data. "data" contains all databases. It's appx 12 gig in size and uses all of their logical volumes for the instance. My question is, If I can move data off a specific chunk, can I drop the chunck so that I can re-use that disk to create a proper dbspace?? They will not buy more disk. Or I'd try to slowly move it over. My only other choice is to try and do a dbexport to tape. drop the whole data dbspace, edit the schema of each database and create new dbspaces on the disk... Any ideas would be great!! Thanks Ken