Sometimes you have to store a string of numbers in a CHAR column. Probably because the string of digits represents an account number or something similar and storing as an INTEGER or BIGINT doesn't really make sense. The account number could have leading zeros that would be lost if stored as an integer. Parts of the account number could store special information, like positions 2,3 and 4 identify what department an account belongs to and it might be useful to be able to select digit_string[2,4]. There are plenty of reasons to store numerical data in a string.

I needed a way to extract the individual words from a sentence stored in a single character field. After some failed google searches and no desire to install a Datablade or write a C UDR for something that doesn't need to have killer performance, I decided to write my own quick and dirty SPL function.

my_strtok(str, delim, token_num) will take a string, break it into individual tokens based the delimiter and return the Nth token of the string.

Running this:

execute function my_strtok("How now brown cow", " ", 3)

John Adamski posted a question to the IIUG SIGs about how to identify a session that caused the long transaction that eventually put his system in a Blocked:LONGTX state.

Informix Engine Defies Laws of the Universe


I recently inherited an Informix engine from another department as part of a server migration and upgrade to Innovator-C. In my life long pursuit of finding unattended Informix engines with ridiculously long up times I did an 'onstat -' to see how many days this engine had been running.

[informix]$ onstat -

IBM Informix Dynamic Server Version 10.00.UC3R1   -- On-Line (Prim) -- Up 869 days 12:02:13 -- 2423888 Kbytes