Server Administrator

Server Administrator is a collection of functionally rich utilities that help you keep IBM Informix database servers performing at peak levels. It allows you to manage server's operational modes, examine its profile, ONCONFIG parameters, I/O statistics and logical file details. A collection of pre-defined reports can be quickly run to assess server's performance, data storage space utilization, to highlight problems with locks and user sessions.

Server Administrator's extensive facilities for managing User Sessions provide you with ability to analyze user sessions activity, including, locks placed by a session, session's I/O statistics and last executed SQL statement, which can be captured for subsequent performance tuning with the help of Execution Plan Analyzer. User sessions can be sorted by a database, host computer, maximum number of locks and I/O activity to flag sessions that create server bottlenecks. Problematic user sessions can be easily terminated.

Server Administrator's data storage management facilities enable you to easily create or delete DB Spaces, BLOB Spaces and Chunks and to examine their parameters in detail, such as filled and free space percentages, tablespaces data allocation and other data storage related information. It also helps you quickly examine parameters for an individual table, such as data size and its allocation between extents, DB Space allocations, and locks currently placed on the table.

Table extent sizes affect SQL query performance and amount of disk space consumed by a table. To help you plan for efficient use of your data storage resources, Table Extent Size Calculator can recommend optimal values for table EXTENT and NEXT EXTENT parameters, based on estimated number of rows. In providing its recommendations, Table Extent Size Calculator takes into consideration data and attached index pages along with small blob data located in the tablespace.

To manage your data storage space more efficiently Table Reorganization Wizard helps you to reorganize table structure and data allocation to reduce number of table extents and reclaim wasted space, move data to a different DB Space or fragment it between multiple DB Spaces.

Server Administrator also comes with built-in telnet terminal, that automatically connects to the desired server host and set all required Informix environment variables to speed up the process, enabling you to execute any of your favorite utilities, such as ONSTAT, ONMODE, ONTAPE, ONBAR, as well as any other server-side script or shell command.

Object Explorer

Object Explorer is the integrated command center for all Server Studio™ JE tools and serves as a convenient central point for managing all connected database servers. It offers an easy-to-use interactive, function-rich system management interface that provides in-depth Informix database catalog navigation by displaying and interpreting objects in the catalog and lets you manage and process database objects with ease.

SQL Editor

SQL Editor is a powerful, full-featured color-coded editor, customized specifically to support IBM Informix SPL and SQL languages. It provides fully multi-threaded, non-blocking execution of scripts, display of multiple result sets in spreadsheet-style grids, SQL syntax checking of an entire script or just the highlighted portion, displays the basic statistics of the executed SQL statements (i.e. number of rows affected by the operation, execution and fetch time for each query executed) and fully supports LOAD and UNLOAD statements to provide data import and export functionality in SQL scripts.

A built-in Image Viewer allows direct viewing of images stored in BLOB/BYTE table columns and image files. SQL Editor also includes an integrated Query Execution Plan Analyzer to help you tune the performance of your SQL queries by analyzing the execution plan selected by the Informix server's Query Optimizer.

Table Editor

Table Editor is a comprehensive visual editor for creating new database tables or editing those that already exist. It allows you to examine Tables and Views properties (such as columns, indexes and triggers) in the Object Explorer and provides highly granular access to all table attributes including columns, datatypes, table and index fragmentation definitions, referential integrity constraints, as well as primary and foreign keys.

Schema Manager

Schema Manager is highly intuitive graphical tool for effective management of the DDL script files for either entire database schemas, or user-defined sub-schemas that may be comprised of either particular types or groups of database objects. Full support for managing all dependent database objects to maintain the integrity of the user-defined sub-schemas is built-in. DB Schema Manager can directly deploy database schemas or sub-schemas and allows you to specify how to map DB spaces and BLOB spaces from the source to the target server.

DB Difference Analyzer

DB Difference Analyzer is a powerful change management tool that allows you to compare entire databases, regardless of whether they are located on the same or on different servers. It is capable of performing comparative analysis of all database objects' properties including table structures, referential integrity, fragmentation, and syntax of stored procedures, triggers and views. Entire databases, individual database objects or groups of objects can be examined for changes. Comparison results can be saved in an external text file.

Another powerful feature of the DB Difference Analyzer is its ability to generate synchronization scripts based on database comparison results. It enables you to specify the objects to include in a synchronization script and to designate which database is to be the source and which the target. If the synchronization script contains operations that might lead to loss of data when the script will execute, DB Difference Analyzer provides a warning. It is also capable of performing differential analysis between ONCONFIG parameters of two servers, or any two text files (i.e. SQL scripts, data files, etc.).

Dependencies Analyzer

Dependencies Analyzer is a graphical impact analysis tool that helps you examine "up" and "down" dependencies of any database object, including referential integrity constraints as well as call tree dependencies for stored procedures and triggers. It also provides a powerful database search function, which permits searching for any object usage pattern within a single or multiple databases, or for any text string within the syntax of any database object. Results of a database search or dependencies analysis are presented in the form of a convenient graphical dependencies trees with full drill-down capabilities, enabling you to see not only the list of dependent objects, but also to examine the exact object usage context and the relevant SQL syntax.

Data Manager

Data Manager is an interactive graphical tool that helps you examine and edit data in database tables, synonyms and views. Data is presented within an adjustable grid - similar to a spreadsheet - where you can apply filters and sorts, as well as limit number of rows to retrieve from the database. Cell Editor enables direct import or export of binary data and images into table columns and facilitates visual editing of large size text data or complex datatypes, such as ROW TYPES and LISTS. Data Manager provides powerful Data Import and Data Export Wizards that enable you to visually map multiple external data files to database objects and to specify complex data transformation rules. Multiple data import and export jobs can be launched simultaneously against one or multiple database servers, without blocking them.

Data Manager also contains a robust and highly flexible Test Data Generator that can create large data sets to test your SQL queries performance and back-end application logic. It supports number of data value generation methods, including random, text file-based or values obtained from a database and provides the ability to specify data ranges, text data patterns, sequential data generation, BLOB and CLOB data generation, and more. Test Data Generator automatically manages referential integrity constraints, unique indexes and other dependencies, which usually make creation of test data a complicated and error-prone process.

Permissions Manager

Permissions Manager is an easy to use visual permission editor that hides the complexities of managing database security. It enables you to add new or edit the existing Users and Roles to a database, grant or revoke permissions for Users, Roles and databases objects, as well as assign Users to Roles and Roles to databases objects. Permissions Manager's flexibility makes it equally easy to manage permissions for a group of databases objects, Users or Roles as it is for a single one. Editing an existing database object, such as a stored procedure or a view, requires first dropping it, then re-creating it anew, which results in a loss of previously defined permissions for that object. Recovering permissions after each object modification is a tedious and an error-prone job. Permission Manager solves this problem by automatically recovering and applying all prior permissions to any object after it has been modified.

SPL Debugger

SPL Debugger is the only interactive debugger for Informix database servers' stored procedures and triggers available on the market and contains powerful capabilities usually found only in high level programming languages. It enables you to execute stored procedures and triggers line-by-line, to step into nested procedures or fired triggers, to set breakpoints, to watch and to modify values of procedures' variables and calling arguments, break infinite loops, etc. SPL Debugger can be invoked from any client application or development tool, such as Visual Basic, C++, Informix-4GL, etc. and can "hook" into a stored procedure or trigger already executing on the server, enabling you to identify the cause of an infinite loop or to pinpoint the slowest portion of the code.

Benchmark Runner

Benchmark Runner is a powerful tool for creating custom load test scenarios that simulate behavior of your database applications. Load scenarios are executed from hundreds of virtual user sessions and client-side response time is automatically measured. You can also use the Sentinel™ Performance Monitors to measure the impact of these scenarios on the database server resources and overall performance.

Benchmark Runner is very useful for analyzing performance of your database applications before and after you change the database server's configuration settings. For example, after some changes in the server configuration, the performance of OLTP applications may improve, but performance of the decision support applications might decrease. Benchmark Runner load scenarios allow you to create a consistent performance benchmark tests for variety of transactions and run these tests after each configuration change to see what impact they had on different classes of applications.