Re: I want to go back to C-ISAM

Maybe, with the help of your "support" company, you could review your database recovery strategy in light of your recent experiences. Potentially you could : 1/ But each database in a different dbspace the no "downtime" on the other systems. 2/ Export you databases each night? 3/ Use Multiple instances, critical databases in one and non critical/development databases in another? 4/ HDR to a second server in read only mode Just some ideas, I am sure there are others. > > I'm just bloody annoyed with IDS backups (and our support company, but > mainly IDS). We need to retrieve a single dbspace from a Level 0 > backup, on to a different machine (can't have downtime on the live > machine). I've found out now that we need to have everything > *identical* on both machines down to chunks allocated to each dbspace, > even if the particular dbspace I'm restoring is identical on both > machines. This is outrageous - because I can't have downtime on our > live machine, I'm *required* to have a second, identically set-up > machine with similar disk-space requirements and an extra informix > licence. I have the machine, but I now need to buy disk space in > quick or shout at the support company enough until they restore it for > me on one of their machines. And it's not like this problem's never > going to happen again - it only takes one bozo programmer to > accidentally remove all the useful information from a table, or a > dopey systems administrator to accidentally drop a database. > > Bring back C-ISAM - the raw .dat and .idx files are sitting there on a > cpio tape and I can selectively restore anything I need to, to a > different area, different machine if I want to - sure, there's a very > slight chance that they'll be corruptions, but bcheck'll sort it out > and there are a surfeit of hacks I can use to get things right. Now > I'm faced with the prospect of changing the backup process to unload > every bloody table in the databases (there are approximately 1000 > tables) and performing a separate backup to standard tape. > > Why does IDS want to be it's own operating system? It seems to want > access to raw disk, but you can't restore meaningful data from > backups. It wants a tempdbs, where under C-ISAM, the /tmp/ unix > directory was perfectly fine. Let me maintain *one* system - the OS > or the database, but don't make me maintain both. > > Sure, IDS is faster, and has got far far better client/server support, > but the improvements in SQL interface are negligible, and I'm sure > given a 2-processor 64bit machine with 4GB memory, C-ISAM would be > much quicker too. > > #end rant