Informix Error -150

Reasons / Common Causes

-150 stands apart from every other code in this range: it isn't an "ISAM error" message at all — it's a licensing/edition limitation. The database server in use is the free demonstration version, which enforces hard, severe limits on the number of tables and the size of tables it can manage, and the operation just attempted exceeded one of those limits.

1. Running the demonstration edition of Informix, which is intentionally restricted — this isn't a bug or a misconfiguration, it's the demo edition doing exactly what it's designed to do once its limits are reached.
2. A demo/eval installation used well past its intended evaluation scope — set up for a short internal trial, then left in place as real usage grew organically until it hit this wall.
3. Team confusion about which edition is actually installed — developers unaware the environment is running the demo edition rather than a licensed production version, having grown schema and data until this limit surfaced unexpectedly.
4. A CI/test environment provisioned with a demo installation for convenience, which then hits this limit as test data or schema complexity grows over time in ways the original setup didn't anticipate.

Solutions / Resolution

1. Contact an IBM representative about purchasing or licensing the production version of the software — per the official guidance, this is fundamentally a licensing decision, not a technical workaround to engineer around.
2. Confirm which edition is actually installed if this was unexpected — verify version/edition information to check whether the environment was ever meant to be a demo install, or whether this is a genuine surprise worth investigating.
3. Plan a migration to a licensed edition promptly if demo usage has quietly become long-term or production-adjacent use — the demo edition's limits only become more restrictive relative to a growing real workload, not less.
4. For CI/test environments hitting this limit, consider whether a licensed edition (even a smaller tier) or a different lightweight database intended for sustained testing use is a better fit than a demo edition meant for short evaluation.

Examples

Confirming the installed edition

onstat -
-- review the version/edition banner to confirm whether this is
-- genuinely the demo edition, if that wasn't already known

There isn't a code-level workaround example to give here, unlike the rest of this range — the resolution is licensing, not a technical fix.

Diagnostic Checks

1. Check the installed edition/version to confirm demo status if this wasn't already known.
2. Review which specific limit was hit (table count vs. table size) from surrounding application or server messages, if that detail helps inform licensing conversations about the actual scale needed.

Related Errors / Related Topics

• -100 — "ISAM error: duplicate value for a record with unique key." Unrelated in cause — noted here only because it shares this numeric neighborhood; -150 is a licensing limitation, not an ISAM-level error at all.

If you weren't expecting to be running the demo edition, confirming that first is worth doing before anything else — this may be pointing at an environment provisioning mix-up rather than a deliberate evaluation that's simply run its course.