Informix Interview Preparation Guide

Yes, you can start Informix in verbose mode:
oninit -v (this works on NT as well)
Informix will print everything that happens.
To close the verbose mode: start a second terminal session (UNIX) or command prompt (NT) and execute:
onmode -ky
N.B. Don't close your terminal session (UNIX) or command prompt (NT) while in verbose mode. This will take Informix offline immediately.

If Informix is still online, you can get a new onconfig with:
onstat -c >onconfig
If Informix is offline, you can retrieve the settings from the database with:
oncheck -pR
or
oncheck -pP 1 1

Yes, but you need to install version 7.30 TC 6 or higher.

The informix-list@iiug.org mailing list is a bi-directional gateway to
the comp.databases.informix (c.d.i) UseNet news group. Messages posted
to the news group are forwarded by mail to subscribers of the mailing
list; responses sent to the informix-list@iiug.org email address are
also posted to the news group; and the gateway manages to keep track of
things so that postings do not repeat themselves. The mailing list is
'closed' in that you cannot post directly to the list unless you also
subscribe to the list. However, you can always post to the news group
instead; that is fully open and unmoderated.

None; this is a news group! That is, there are no rules enforced by the
software. There are periodically discussions on c.d.i about what should
and should not be said. This is my FAQ, so it gets my spin on the rules
that should be followed.

* Format: HTML postings are strongly discouraged; so are MIME
postings. Both cause problems with many frequently used news
readers. That means that attachments aren't encouraged either.
Also, sending the same information twice, once in HTML and once in
plain text, is downright wasteful.

You may ask questions about Perl, DBI and DBD::Informix, but only if an
IBM or Informix database is involved, somehow -- it is not a general
forum for arbitrary questions about Perl. However, there are
alternative forums that you should also use, described in the product.
However, those locations have changed over time, so you should be aware
of the official home, http://dbi.perl.org/, which contains pointers to
how to subscribe to the dbi-users at perl.org (anti-spammed) mailing
list. Note that (as of 2005-03-01 and v2005.01) the email address for
DBD::Informix support is dbd.informix at gmail.com (anti-spammed).

A chunk is a physical portion of disk on which Informix stores its data. A chunk can be either a raw partition or a file system file. Informix suggests that a chunk's name be a symbolic link to the actual chunk. For example, if you are using /dev/rdsk/c6t0d0s1 as a chunk, you could create a symbolic link named /dev/informix/chunk1 that points to /dev/rdsk/c6t0d0s1. That way, if there are ever any problems with that disk, you could replace the disk with another one and just change the symbolic link.

An Informix instance is a single connection to shared memory. It is represented by one or more on init processes. When Informix is started or stopped, these processes appear and disappear. Informix used to use the term "server" when referring to an instance, hence the environment variable DBSERVERNAME.

he database server uses a concept called key-value locking to lock the deleted row. When the database server deletes a row, key values in the indexes for the table are not removed immediately. Instead, each key value is marked as deleted, and a lock is placed on the key value. One of the most important uses for key-value locking is to assure that a unique key remains unique through the end of the transaction that deleted it.

The Informix database management system was conceived and designed by Roger Sippl in the late 1970s. Informix was founded in 1980, went public in 1986, and for a period during the 1990s Informix was the second most popular database system, after Oracle.