Environment Variables

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Environment Variables

As part of the installation and setup process, the system or database administrator sets certain environment variables that enable IBM Informix products to work within a particular operating-system environment. This section lists the environment variables that affect your ability to use DB–Access.

Important:

You must have $INFORMIXDIR/bin in your path if you use DB–Access on a UNIX platform or %INFORMIXDIR%\bin in your path if you use DB–Access on a Windows platform. Your operating system uses the path to locate the initialization script and the dbaccess executable.

UNIX Only

In a UNIX environment, the database server must have the appropriate terminal set up from among those listed in the INFORMIXTERM environment variable.

End of UNIX Only

You can set the following optional environment variables:

DBACCNOIGN rolls back an incomplete transaction if you execute the LOAD command in menu mode.
DBACCNOIGN rolls back an incomplete transaction if an error occurs while you are in Non-Menu mode.
DBCENTURY lets you choose the appropriate expansion for DATE and DATETIME values that have only a two-digit year, such as 04/15/98.
DBDATE specifies the end-user formats of DATE values. See IBM Informix: Migration Guide for more information on this variable.
DBEDIT sets the default DB–Access text editor without changing the default text editor associated with the operating-system shell.
For more information on how DB–Access uses the text editor that you specify as default, see Entering a New SQL Statement .
DBFLTMASK sets the default floating-point values of data types FLOAT, SMALLFLOAT, and DECIMAL within a 14-character buffer.
The effect of this variable is limited to the DB–Access display size for numbers.
DELIMIDENT causes the database server to interpret double quoted (") text as identifiers rather than strings.
IFMX_HISTORY_SIZE determines the number of SQL commands logged in the command history. The default value is 50. The maximum value is 500.
Note:

In the menu mode, multiple SQL commands in a dbaccess editor can execute all at once and will consume only one dbaccess history entry.
IFX_LONGIDdetermines whether a client application can handle long identifiers .
Note:

If you use the IFX_LONGID environment variable to support SQL identifiers with up to 128 bytes, some error, warning, or other messages of DB-Access might truncate database object names that include more than 18 characters in their identifiers. You can avoid this truncation by not declaring names that have more than 18 characters.

For more information on environment variables, see the IBM Informix: Guide to SQL Reference.