RE: aix

John Campbell is concerned about moving from administering IDS on Solaris to administering IDS on AIX: >My experience with informix has been soley on Solaris. Currently, we are >running Solaris 9 and IDS 9.40.FC5. I am being asked if I can support >several IDS 9.40 databases running on AIX. I am not expected to do >anything with the operating system at all - just the database... I had the same experience a few years ago, but the transition went pretty smoothly. There are a few minor issues, but nothing that will trip you up for long. Of course, you should read the machine-specific notes. Doug Conrey mentioned the page size, and Barry Leb mentioned memory configuration issues in 32-bit. The latter essentially boils down to not letting AIX allocate a lot of segments. Better to over allocate up front, because AIX gets flakey when you start allocating a lot of segments. I used to get really frustrated with AIX, until, eventually, I found that almost any system administration I ever need to do, from adding users to tuning memory, is in smit, the general all-purpose AIX System Management Interface Tool. I am embarrassed with how long it took me to figure that out. I do encourage you to learn something about the OS's peculiarities. They are not all bad. For example, a lot of configuration can be handled on the fly, instead of requiring a reboot to reset kernel parameters. A DBA would be hard-pressed to effectively administer IDS without ever touching the OS layer, at least for monitoring. Hopefully, you are not in a situation like so many DBA's, where you are on your own. On the other hand, there is another extreme, where DBA's are expected to function in isolation from the system administrators. Here is the complete list of useful books and websites on AIX that I have found: . Other than that, you can always use Google to search the IBM site. The info is usually there, just hard to find. Sincerely, Christopher Coleman Steering Committee President Kansas City Informix Users Group http://www.iiug.org/kciug Database Analyst Pharmacy Division Mediware Information Systems, Inc.

Christopher Coleman wrote: > Here is the complete list of useful books and websites on AIX that I > have found: . > You should search your favorite bookstore website for: The AIX Survival Guide, Andy Siegert, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-59388-2 It is not only instructive for AIX, it has a lot of great information useful for other UNIX versions and variants. I keep this one around for not only AIX but other UNIX work, it is very detailed on a lot of the information. It is probably due for an update with the latest stuff but still quite useful even it it's been out for a while. See Also: AIX 5L Administration, Randal K Michael, ISBN 0-07-222255-7 ( hint: saw these on amazon, which shows no less than 3 AIX books plus other IBM books )