More Informix Questions

Ok I am about 4 months away from doing a massive upgrade on our primary database server to IDS 2000. Unfortunately, I don't to break things until there are school vacations so I will be done with the demo server somewhere in January and have to cool my heals until Spring Break. I am in process of revisiting every table in every database we are currently supporting under IDS7.x and making them a lot more efficient (reducing duplicate data and the whole database theory thing). Do any of you database experts want to throw any tips that might be beneficial to me as I get ready to migrate? Well for the real informix q's: with all this in mind, i am wanting to verify I am understanding the licensing issues concerning the database # of users. Paperwork wise, we have paid for a 5 user license on each of our database servers (demo and production). Is there any nifty commands to find out how many we are actually maxing out at so that I make sure that we don't under pay for our maintenance and support costs? What constitues a user in the Informix world. I as the DBA tend to have a dbaccess session open whatching certain tables as they get auto-updated from the mainframe adabase dbms used by our student information systems. I assume this is considered a user connection. We also have a generic connecting program for all of the db servers (and the datawarehouse that runs sas) known as the pool so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel as the java developers write programs. I believe that we have that program set so that a maximum of 50 threads can be talking to all of our various db servers at one time. I am unsure if there is the possibility of setting a particular server in this program to only allow say 10 connections or some level of granularity. Do each of these jdbc connections count as a concurrent user as well? There has been discussion in my area about moving the datawarehouse off of sas (which is insane to use as anything but a statistical package) and onto Informix. One of the reasons we haven't pushed this before now is due to the cost of odbc/jdbc drivers that would be usable on a client end for the access gui based people around campus. We own a copy of the client sdk distribution sent to me when i received my updated version of IDS. I have questions about how many copies of the drivers on this disk can be utilized and what are the licensing restraints on making sure we can get get rid of all these other drivers and settle down to one. Any chance that we can distribute this version to a few hundred for cheap and help make sure sas goes away as a db engine soon?" I have been using dbimport/export to backup the old IDS7 engine by dropping it from the raw dbspace to a place that our Veritas Netbackup server will notice it and dump it to DLT. Are there better ways of doing this? Any nice examples of how people are backing up these datasets to non informix/non local tape drive options like veritas? I think that is all for today on q's to wade through. Thanks to everyone who has been helping me (re)build how we make my University reach the 21st century when it comes to database services. Scott Fendley University of Arkansas