SAN powered down while the engine was online, leaving 10 down chunks
Action: Patched the chunk and dbspace structure and brought the dbspace back online.
⏱ 15 mins NIL
🚨 Emergency support System down?
System down?
We've seen it before.
Out of support, out of hours, or out of options — for nearly 30 years we've recovered Informix systems others had given up on, often in under an hour.
We cover situations including:
Examples of recovered systems
Insufficient logical log space for rollback, leaving a locked system
Action: Edited reserved areas with custom software and grew the logical log space so the transaction could roll back.
⏱ 45 mins NIL
Engine crash moving a large table — customer down for over 3 days
Action: Manually completed the transaction, brought the dbspace online, and patched the table into the system tables.
⏱ 45 mins NIL
Sysadmin newfs'd 360 GB of disk (180 chunks) on the main 750 GB dbspace
Action: Patched the chunks back into the system and brought the dbspace back online.
⏱ Not recorded NIL
Catastrophic failure when all chunk links were removed
Action: Stepped through the raw devices and, with the reserved pages, recreated every missing link.
⏱ Not recorded NIL
System failed to restart after a restore (IBM bug IC56156)
Action: Support had lapsed, so the IBM upgrade path was closed. Edited rootdbs and manually reset the flags telling the engine it had been an RSS secondary.
⏱ Not recorded NIL
Catastrophic rootdbs failure on an Online V5 system
Action: Extracted system information from the failed disk, wrote custom software to recover the table structures, then applied them to the extracted binary data to generate ASCII unload files.
⏱ Not recorded Data recovered