Missing tools

With the introduction of the graphical tools, Informix discontinued support for the on-monitor character-based utility which has been available on both UNIX and NT systems for several versions of Informix products. Its functions have been taken over in a large part by two NT GUIs, Command Center and Space Explorer.

Onmonitor actually made calls to other character-based programs that still remain with current NT Informix systems, but onmonitor was a very good frontend for them. Since these underlying programs such as onspaces, onparams, oninit, and ontape still exist in the NT world, any functionality lost with onmonitor can be accomplished by using the underlying programs.

The only noticeable loss that I've found to date has been the inability to create chunks with temporary attributes with Space Explorer. In the UNIX environment, the DBA will put his temporary data in dataspaces created as temporary spaces in onmonitor. In order to do this with the latest NT release (7.23), the DBA must run onspaces manually with a "-t" parameter that will create the databases properly as temp spaces. As this book goes to press, Informix has announced that onmonitor will again become available for NT systems, beginning with Version 7.24.