Re: Upgrading to 7.23

MIS Dept wrote: > > Finally the time has come . . . > > Our third-party financial software company is finally supporting Informix > 7.2x on the HP 10.01 platform. Now I get to experiment with some new > toys after attending the 7.2 Extended Feature Set class here in Atlanta. > > What's different about the 7.23 engine? I know about the in-place table > alters, onbar, and the high-performance loader. Anything else I need to > be on the lookout for? Any gotchas? Is performance better? PDQ and > fragmentation smoother? Any other considerations for upgrading? I assume you mean differences over 7.1x. The I/O code for page cleaner threads and AIO VPs was rewritten to make them more efficient so you will be able to get away with fewer of these freeing resources. The shared memory initialization and VP startup code seems to have been revamped, on our platform (DG/UX) 7.13 took between 15 and 20 minutes to bring up 209 VPs of various types and initialize 800MB of shared memory. The 7.21 engine (the latest available for DG/UX M88K) comes up in 5-7 minutes instead! It also looks like I can cut down from 160 AIO VPs to between 80 and 120 depending on the database and query mix. New indexes created under 7.2x are 4 bytes wider but existing indexes are fully supported so there is no need to recreate indexes, just be aware that you will need to allow more space for new and rebuilt indexes after the upgrade. There is a new database in rootdbs (sysutils) and some new tables in sysmaster which should require less than 1500 pages. No gotchas except that the automatic upgrade of sysmaster and the addition of sysutils sometimes fails when the engine comes up the first time. Just shutdown and bring it up again and oninit will complete the upgrade the second time around I've never had it fail twice in a row. Art S. Kagel