Re: connecting informix to Data Junction

kenlinder@hotmail.com wrote: :I am part of a data warehouse effort. We need to be able to connect : : "Data Junction" on NT4.0 :as well as : "DJEngine" on SUN OS : :to a remote informix database. : :Which informix products are necesary to do this? I think I need 'Informix :Connect; on the clients, but I am uncertain of what I need on the server :side. What is your server? Informix version and running on what machine? First the direct connections that may be usefull: It seems to mee that Data Junction and DJEngine both support Informix directly. I haven't tested any yet (but will soon) so I don't know for sure. If they do you need I-Connect on Windows NT 4.0. This is a free product from Informix that is included with new engines when you purchase them (should be on your CD). It also comes included if you download the Relational Object Manager from the Informix web site. (Go via the trybuy option to find it.) On the Sun machine you need no additional software if the DJEngine runs on the same server as your database. That seems to me to be the only natural place to run it. If you for some reason have it on some other machine you would need I-Connect for Unix (Sun OS) for this machine. That's of course a different product from I-Connect for Windows NT although it has the same functionality (connectivity to your database server on another machine). As far as I know this is also a free product from Informix that should be available on your CD with the engine if you have that for the same platform (Sun OS). Otherwise you would have to optain it from Informix. You could of course use Data Junction on Windows NT with an ODBC driver as well. In case you want to do that you should go to http://www.openlinksw.com to download a trial version of their server based ODBC drivers (not the "Lite" version). I don't know wether the DJEngine supports ODBC on Unix (also awailable from OpenLink) and in case not how the spesifications from the DataJunction product would work with the DJEngine using different connectivity products. Generally I-Connect is your first option though. ODBC may however give you better (yes realy - better) performance and with the OpenLink drivers surely better security. As you are working with a data warehouse direct connection to the Informix database may not give you enough performance if the amount of data becomes large. In this case you might look into the other options you have. If you are loading into the Informix database you might want to have DataJunction (or in effect the DJEngine) create flat files for the high performance loader of Informix. Although this would give you a two step process for loading it might be faster than having the DJEngine insert directly into the database. If you are extracting out of the Informix database it *might* also be an option to use one of the unload options of informix to onload to flat files first and have the DJEngine read this. The speed advantages is however a little more doubtfull here. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org