The intended audience for this handbook is INFORMIX-OnLine Dynamic Server administrators who need a guide to managing and maintaining this database environment. The book contains a variety of tips about initialization, configuration, performance tuning, monitoring, recovery, and archiving of databases. It is not intended as documentation for the software. Rather, it is a vehicle for the author, who is president of the International INFORMIX Users Group, to share his expertise.

Chapter 1 introduces OnLine Dynamic Server and describes the architecture of the OnLine Dynamic Server engine. Chapter 2 is a brief overview of the basic features that need to be addressed from a design perspective in planning the implementation of an OnLine Dynamic Server  environment. 

The next three chapters address the issues of initializing, configuring, and operating the server engine. Chapter 3 covers the details of creating instances and databases. Chapter 4 is a technical discussion of administrative tasks, such as adding or dropping database spaces, changing logging modes, moving and resizing logs, starting and stopping an instance, and terminating a user thread. Chapter 5 discusses database administration issues, including database and table creation, fragmentation, constraints, and indexing. This chapter also presents new SQL statements that were introduced by the new version of OnLine Dynamic Server.

Chapters 6 through 8 cover database recovery and performance tuning. Chapter 6 describes the process of archiving OnLine Dynamic Server instances. Chapter 7 reviews the utilities for monitoring instance performance and checking the integrity of database elements. Chapter 8 discusses some possible ways of improving the performance of OnLine Dynamic Server instances. It covers the key performance-related components, including the query optimizer, virtual processors, and the parallel data query functionality of the server engine.

The remaining chapters aim to provide additional insight into the operation of the server engine. Chapter 9 explains how to replicate an instance between different servers and how to recover from failures that occur in replication mode. Chapter 10 describes the mechanisms that the engine should use to maintain integrity. It details the recovery process that should be followed when restarting the server after a crash. It also mentions the technical support resources provided by INFORMIX. A detailed discussion of distributed transactions and OnLine Dynamic Server’s two-phase commit protocol is provided in chapter 11. Finally, chapter 12 includes some documentation on a collection of software that can be useful for OnLine Dynamic Server administrators.

At the end of every chapter, the author provides a summary and a list of the most important points covered in that chapter, as well as an introduction to the following chapter. He also provides warnings when appropriate. An accompanying CD-ROM contains a library of technical articles, runnable scripts, and worksheets intended to simplify database and engine administration.

I highly recommend this book to INFORMIX-OnLine administrators.