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Asked: 2026-05-10T15:47:15+00:00

We are trying to duplicate one of our informix database on a test server,

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We are trying to duplicate one of our informix database on a test server, but without Informix expertise in house we can only guess what we need to do. I am learning this stuff on the fly myself and nowhere near the expertise level needed to operate Informix efficiently or even inefficiently. Anyhow… We managed to copy the .dat and .idx files from the live server somewhere. Installed Linux and the latest Informix Dynamic Server on it and have it up and running.

Now what should we do with the .dat and idx files from the live server? Do we copy it somewhere and it will recognize it automatically?

Or is there an equivalent way like you can do attach DB from MS SQLServer to register the database files in the new database?

At my rope end…

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  1. You’ve asked a pretty complicated question without realizing it. Informix is architected as a shared everything database engine, meaning all resources available to the instance are available to every database in that instance. This means that more than one database can store data in any given dbspace, .dat or .idx file in your case. Most DBA’s know better than to do that but it’s something to be aware of. Given this knowledge you now know that the .dat and .idx files do not belong to a database but belong the instance. The dbspaces and files were created to contain your databases data but they technically belong to the instance. It’s worth noting that the .dat and .idx files are known to the database by the logical dbspace name.

    Armed with this background info and assuming that the production and development servers are running the same OS and that your hardware is relatively the same, not a combination of PARISC, Itanium or x86/x64, I’ll throw a couple of options out for you.

    1. Create the dbspaces that you need in the new instance and use onunload and onload to copy the database from production to development.
    2. Use ontape or onbar to backup the entire production instance and restore it over your development instance.

    Option 1 requires that you know what the dbspaces are named and how large they are. Use onstat -d on the production instance to find this out. BTW, the numbers listed in onstat -d are in pages, I believe that Linux is a 2K page.

    Option 2 simply requires that the paths for the data files are the same on both servers. This means that the ROOTDBS needs to be the same in both instances. That can be found by executing onstat -c | grep ROOTDBS

    There’s a lot that has been left out but I hope that this gives you the info that you need to move forward with your task.

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