Chapter 11. Exploring the Sysmaster Database

by Lester Knutsen

This is the only chapter in the book that was not written by the author. A year or so ago, Lester Knutsen presented a paper on the subject of the SMI (System Monitoring Interface) tables to a standing-room-only crowd at the Informix World Users Group. Since then, his paper and the accompanying shell scripts for querying the SMI tables have become staples in the arsenals of hundreds or even thousands of DBAs across the world. I had originally resigned myself to digging through the documentation and writing a chapter on the SMI tables, and I wanted to be able to include Lester's scripts on the CD that comes with this book. When I e-mailed Lester, he graciously gave me permission to include the scripts, and included the paper as documentation for the scripts.

When I read the paper again, I remembered just how good it had been and realized that there was no way that I was going to do a better job on the subject than Lester had already done, so I e-mailed him back and obtained his permission to include the paper in the book. I'm getting tired of writing just about now, and I figured that you readers could use a break from my "breezy blue-collar writing style." Lester's paper was written before Informix changed the name from "OnLine" to "INFORMIX-Dynamic Server," so he refers to IDS as "OnLine". Be assured that he is talking about what we now know as IDS, that is, Versions 7 and above.

So, without further ado, I'll take a break and let Lester educate you about the finer points of the SMI tables.