Greetings to all,

this is my first post on this forum, as I've been looking around for days for a way to solve a problem. Since I found nothing so far, I'll leave a question here, hoping some experienced Informix user will have a 'trick' to help me somewhat.

I'll just explain what it is then:

Scenario:
A customer of ours has a very old Compaq Proliant server, running and old ERP software on Informix 5.0.0 UD1 (1992 release...) on SCO OpenUnix 5 platform. This customer has no system administrator, no experienced personnel, the ERP software company has long disappeared, and as far as I know is not willing to upgrade any of the above software/hardware.

Objective: Retrieve (even if in plain text form) the data out of Informix so it can be treated/analysed/transfered to another platform/software combination.

I have extensive knowledge of Linux/general Unix, but nothing this *old*.

My Questions:

Is there an Informix command or procedure that can be executed on this SCO Server that actually outputs a text dump of the full database(s) and their structure?

or

Is there a way to retrieve information directly off dat/idx file pairs, so they can be manipulated by a custom made program?

or

Is there a way to access the informix server from another database system on another platform (Linux with informix ODBC/Windows Server via ODBC, etc).

Any help is greatly, *immensely* appreciated, since we are basically stuck (as our customer is with this software). We would like to help him move on.

If the information I provide is not enough just ask me I'll be glad to give more details if needed.

Thank you!

Hi,
with the command dbexport db the database is written to that directory you are starting the command from. All informations, table structure, table contents will be written to text files. Also it is possible to import Informix data into Window SQL Server via odbc, if you install the informix driver (Merant or informix).

Your Informix Database have to migrate to highter version

- command to full export all data to text file is 'dbexport'
- If your database is very big over limitation of 'dbexport' you can use unload SQL Command and get schema of whole database such as:
Get all schema (command line): dbschema -d <dbname>
Get data (SQL Command ): unload to <text file> select * from <table>
Import data (command line): dbimport
Load data (SQL Command) :load from <textfile> insert into <table>

if your database is bigger than limiation of dbexport you have to change the way to get database schema and unload data manualy

Thank you a lot, that solved my problem. I exported the data, and am now re-writing the create table statements, for later import into PostgreSQL. :-)