Complete time stamp of when the server started

Hi family. I SOOO want this one to be a quickie question & answer. Bottom line: How do I get the complete date/time of when the current server instance started up? Currently, the best I can do is: grep 'IBM Informix Dynamic Server Started' < message log > | tail -1|awk '{print $1}' In my case I got 03:35:54 . Now while this is a start ( ahem ) it is obviously missing the date . If it started up last week, this time stamp is less than helpful. Most (all?) other messages in the online log start with a full date-time stamp like 06/13/25 10:09:04 . I was so sure there is a DBINFO parameter that would would hand this to me but I don't see that in the DBINFO documentation . I also recall there is a table in sysmaster that keeps a gazzilion little items about the current server and one row may contain the start date/time. But I don't recall the name of that table. A peruse of sysmaster.sql was an example of searching for the needle in the haystack. (Aside: Author Kurt Vonnegut has advised aspiring authors to "avoid cliches like the plague." :-) (The up time in every onstat heading would involve datetime and interval arithmetic that crosses the month<->day boundary.) So how do find this? Thank y'all for advice. ------------------------------ Jacob Salomon ------------------------------

Try this against sysmaster. It's will show when the internal stats were last cleared (onstat -z) or when Informix was last started. Full disclosure, I think that Art shared this originally! dbaccess sysmaster <<! select current year to second - ( sh_curtime - sh_boottime) units second when_started, ( sh_curtime - sh_boottime) units second seconds_ago, round((( sh_curtime - sh_boottime) units second)::char(20) /60/60,2) hours_ago, round((( sh_curtime - sh_boottime) units second)::char(20) /60/60/24,2) days_ago from sysmaster:sysshmvals; ! You can replace sh_boottime with sh_pfclrtime to get the time that onstat -z was run to clear the internal stats. ------------------------------ Mike Walker xDB Systems, Inc www.xdbsystems.com ------------------------------

select dbinfo("UTC_TO_DATETIME", sh_boottime) from sysmaster:sysshmvals; ------------------------------ Andreas Legner Informix Dev HCL Software ------------------------------

Scott, this is almost exactly what I was looking for. Like I said, I could recall the name of that sysmaster table. But I see 4 time-related fields in there. Here's a query to see them all: select dbinfo('UTC_TO_DATETIME', sh_boottime) boot_time, dbinfo('UTC_TO_DATETIME', sh_pfclrtime) stats_cleared, dbinfo('UTC_TO_DATETIME', sh_curtime) current_time, dbinfo('UTC_TO_DATETIME', sh_bootstamp) boot_tstamp, dbinfo('UTC_TO_DATETIME', sh_stamp) current_time_stamp from sysshmvals And the rather interesting results:boot_time 2025-06-13 03:35:56 stats_cleared 2025-06-13 03:35:56 current_time 2025-06-13 12:10:34 boot_tstamp 1973-02-07 20:44:00 current_time_stamp 1989-05-19 06:00:45 OK, I know my server was bounced ~ 3:30+ this morning. So it makes sense that stats_cleared == boot_time. And just to be certain, I also fetched sh_curtime (current_time) which is correct in my time zone. For my purposes I will use sh_pfclrtime since my purpose is to display I/O stats since beginning of stats. This should be the end of my thread but the other two time stamps caught my curiosity: Column dh_bootstamp (displayed as boot_tstamp) seems to be the Unix time-0 time so I would discount it entirely here. Obviously not used. Column sh_stamp (current_time_stamp), which is listed in sysmaster.sql as "current time stamp" in the comment, makes no sense and it changes every time I run the query, but never anything I can make sense of. Maybe it's not a value translatable to datetime? That said, my bottom line question has been answered, hats off to Scott again. And as I type this, I see Andreas L has piped in with the exact, concise answer to my bottom line question. Now I have only one hat left. :-) MUCH gratitude! ------------------------------ Jacob Salomon ------------------------------

Jacob: It is in sysmaster.sysshmvals.sh_boottime along with the last time that stays were zeroed out. That column is a Unix epoch. You Cadbury get it as a dztetim by using dbinfo: Select dbinfo( 'utc_to_datetime', sh_boottime) From sysmaster.sysshmvals; Art ------------------------------ Art S. Kagel, President and Principal Consultant ASK Database Management Corp. www.askdbmgt.com ------------------------------

The well known chocolate function ? Cheers Paul Paul Watson Oninit LLC +1-913-387-7529 www.oninit.com Oninit® is a registered trademark of Oninit LLC

I HATE Autocorrect! ------------------------------ Art S. Kagel, President and Principal Consultant ASK Database Management Corp. www.askdbmgt.com ------------------------------

Hi Andreas, Can I confirm sh_bootstamp INT, { boot time stamp } sh_stamp INT, { current time stamp } are based on the internal timestamp counter which counts "internal server operations"? When exactly is the internal timestamp counter updated? Regards, David. ------------------------------ David Williams Senior Database Platform Engineer Flutter London ------------------------------