STATO !!!

After discussing some surprising system statistics with our DBA I thought I'd try and get a wee project on the go. I'm going to link VB to our database via ADO and try and get useful statistics from IDS that I can then transfer to a spreadsheet or whatever for analysis in an automated fashion. This will help me learn VB and at the end of the day we might just have something we can use. My idea is this : The VB app runs. The user hits the big red button to say 'snapshot statistics'. These get logged in Excel or whatever for analysis. My questions for the group are : What statistics would be useful and why ? Initially I'll look at dbspace reads versus writes. Are their any good texts on analysing Informix statistics ? Any examples of queries etc gratefully received. Obviously whats useful and whats not is down to individual opinion / setups , but lets hear it anyway. If at the end of this project it was actually any good I'd be willing to give it away.

Cheers for the response so far. Keep them coming. I would say I'd prefer to do all the analysis using the system tables. Is that possible ?