Re: Suggestions for improving the 7.x OnLine Engine installation and configuration

David Williams <djw@smooth1.demon.co.uk> wrote: :In article <333560A4.60CB@mindspring.com>, Tim Schaefer :<tschaefe@mindspring.com> writes :>To all: :> :>I'm interested in what DBAs actually think about the 7.x Engine, :>specifically the installation process, and configuring the ONCONFIG file. :> :>I'll be covering my own opinions of this in my April issue of my ezine, :>located at www.mindspring.com/~tschaefe. I would love to include your :>comments in my article, so please get them to me as soon as possible. This :>is a bit short notice, but I really didn't think about what I was going to :>write about till last week. :-) I've been busy. But I do have some ideas :>in the form of a proposal that I'd like to share. I realize we're on to :>greater versions, what with 8.0 and now Universal Server, but these two are :>so minor hardly anybody I know uses them or even knows them. ( well one or :>two people I know use them but really ) :> :>Maybe these suggestions can improve the product for everyone. :> :>What would you like to see improved in the 7.x install? :> :>What would you like to see improved in the 7.x ONCONFIG and operation? : : Automatic creation of sqlhosts, automatic addition to /etc/services. : Program to verify the about (gets $INFORMIXSERVER, checks entry exists : in $INFORMIXDIR/sqlhosts, does gethostbyname() to check host exists, : does getservbyname fo check services exists). When even the king of configuration and management can want this I may perhaps also chime in. Although the above haven't been too hard for us on single machines setup only, we still want it even for that purpose. We are also soon going to start setting up multiple networked servers and a tool would make it so much easier. However why not include checking of /etc/hosts and suggestions for entries in that file (should probably not be entered automatically). The tool should also check DNS, NIS or whatever the alternate systems are named to see that communications work and most importantly suggest exactly what to do. It's even easy to check what machines are actually out there and let you select servers from a list. The tools should of course connect to all machines where you intend to run Informix servers and do the necessary setup for you. If this is hard (it shouldn't be) suggested setups should be written to a set of files on the local machine. If Informix insist on continuing to supply I-Connect with it's cryptic setup similar utilities should be included with it. Other tools (you may know which) hardly need this. I also have a feeling that it should be possible to make a tool that can help you with the begining of tuning ONCONFIG parameters. I relize that it may be hard, but it should be possible to do something. It might find out the amount of real memory on the server, ask several questions about the database and how it's planned to be used and set up a suggested baseline. Additionally it should provide extensive online help that's tailored to the initial setup it has done. This should explain why the values where set as they where, what effect the different parameters have, why you might want to change them, how you might change them and the effect of changing them. Informix have to work on a tool like that anyway to make tuning easy. A proper tool will of course have to dynamically analyze the actual usage of the database and tune it accordingly. With this I actually forsee a time when we will hardly need DBAs for tuning at this level. I look very much forward to that. May be Informix could start on a simple primitive version now that doesn't initially monitor usage. Just some notches above the current onmonitor. : A program I'm planned to write as the next part of my toolkit : (I've just finished a tool to dump the complete source to a program : including inlining library functions and other modules). This tool I : need to to check certain functions never get called in a transaction. : : Once I've built the second half of this tool + a parser for : sqexplain.out to eliminate duplicate query plans from it (I'm fed : up of scanning >50 queries most of which are duplicate to find the : one I want...) : : Then I'll write the above!! (Oh yes and a 4GL replacement for : onmonitor as it is not supplied with OWS!!!....leave me without my : favuorite tool will you.......!!!) : : Plenty of ideas, too little time..... 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