RE: Informix database reorganization

John, My replies are imbeded. Regards, David Ashby Joe Lumbley <jlumbley@netcom.com> wrote: : There's one very troubling point about your situation. You are demanding : 100% uptime and your development is "still in progress". Surely you have : separate development and production environments on different machines? : If not, you'll be like a dog chasing its tail. : Good luck.....btw the alter fragment is a good approach. Can ALTER FRAGMENT...INIT IN dbspace be done within the same dbspace? YES Does this work forever or at some point do you have to do a total re-org? It works until you have fragmented your free space to such an extent that there is no more big contiguous pieces (trying not to use the word chunk) of free space left to put the whole table into. The table will then be put into the biggest then the next biggest etc until it is all reorged so you may still have lots of extents after reorging. If we move to a new server with different disk layout, what is the best scenario? The set up should be unrelated to the first unless you are trying to do an ontape restore to the new server or if you are planning on using HDR. Do we try to set it up as a secondary instance with a layout like the primary, restore from a backup, organize it like we want it, and try to replicate the changes, then go live? This is a good technique. What do you want to replicate the data changes or the schema changes? Or does replication require both instances to have the same exact layout? Only so you can do the ontape restore. What tricks does replication allow you to get away with? You probably don't want to use Informix replication. Replication replicates data changes not schema changes. Since we're using BaaN, is it necessary to use the BaaN tools to export and import data into Informix (this = slow) or is it going to be okay to use the Informix export and import utilities? At a guess no, the Informix utilities should suffice. Is the replication thing a waste of time for what we're thinking of doing? Yep, just do all schema changes to both databases. What happens if your Informix server dies (like someone takes an axe to the machine (hire a guard), or a flood(put it in a high building), hurricane(put it underground), etc) and you have to try to restore from backups? How similar do the configurations have to be? You have to have the same dbspaces available. I believe that this is why the first thing from an ontape -r is the dbspace information. Can you create the same number of dbspaces with the same names as before, but just large enough to hold your current data? No they have to be the same size I believe. No one has been able to answer this very well for us to get a warm fuzzy on it and we thought this would be an essential part of a disaster recovery plan for our Informix database. Is this enough or do you need more info? Thanks to all who responded to my previous post and didn't laugh too loud! *runs off to chase tail* Jon Freeland<*> eclypse@millerind.com