Re: online table update?

Ofer Inbar wrote: > > I'm familiar with Oracle 7 but new to Informix 7. > > The server in question will be serving data Web/CGI users, and will be > receiving updates from a remote site every few minutes. The remote > data will come in as comma delimited ASCII. > > 1) Is there an Informix 7 equivalent of Oracle's SQL*Loader to load > this data in? See the manual page on the LOAD statement. The default delimiter is "|" but this can be varied if needed. > 2) Can the database continue serving data to the Web users while the > tables are being updated with the new data? Yes, but .... If you do the loads inside a transaction (so you can roll back if the database chokes on a line, e.g. if one of your data fields contains a comma and upsets the column count) you will impose locks (page or row depending on the lock mode of the table). If you have a lot of rows you may run out of locks. In this case you will need to: 1. Split the load file into smaller portions. 2. Increase the size of the lock table or 3. Lock the whole table. Clearly option 3 may cause a problem in continuing to serve pages. Even if you adopt option 2 the users may start running into the locked rows. Moral: if you want to keep serving users, load the rows in small batches. Ian