Re: Charging for Informix usage

Vic Goldberg <vg19@cornell.edu> wrote in message news:39351CB7.31B68C1C@cornell.edu... > Folks -- > > I work at a university, where, for all sorts of arcane reasons, we > need to charge back users for usage of the database. <snippage> > Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to get information that > would allow me to charge multiple independant users seperately? I don't > need the accounting side, just getting the metrics. One thought is to > set up seperate instances, and track usage for each one, but that would > be less efficient than a single instance with multiple databases. Well (depending which version of Informix have) you can extract database usage information from the instance by doing some queries on the sysmaster database - I'm going from memory here so it might not be exactly correct - but sysptprof has usage statistics on tables, and the database name so you could get somewhere doing that. If you really need to charge individual users and you have disc space and performance to spare, you can switch on auditing for the relevant users. Then using the Informix utilities for examining the audit trails you could charge them by the INSERT or by the SELECT. The audit trails can be switched on or off for various combinations of users and events, and can be loaded into a database for analysis so you should be able to build some charging structure from that. But it can use a lot of disc space and hit perfomance. -- Andrew Pearson "exactly what the web needs less of".