Data Recovery from older Informix DB 1

[oscarse]

Sorry if this is the wrong forum but ...

Does anyone either have a link to or know of somewhere where I can get the DBD file specs for INFORMIX 3.3?

I have all the dbd and dat files which were backed up nightly ... I need to recover the data from an old Xenix box circa 86 and move into another RDB but the going has been painfully slow ... the data is stored in fixed format so I could manually determine the field sizes but that would take a huge amount of time considering there are several hundred fields across many tables and DB's ... so far I have figured out how to recover the Table and Field names out of the dbd files but still struggling with deciphering the Field details.

I have the Informix Manual which describes the data types just not sure how they coded these types in the dbd file. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[olded]

I hope this isn't a dumb question, but don't you have access to the Informix admin tools like dbexport and dbschema?

 

[oscarse]

we have had a hardware failure ... haven't found any old working hardware that is compatible with the old XENIX OS ... the last time I was able to revive an old Harddrive and restore our image files but this time no luck ... kind of hard to run any INFORMIX tools without a machine loaded with XENIX ... so I am hoping to recover the files from the backup files ... plus at this point I would rather get off this old technology once and for all as it is taking too much time to support ... the only detail I am missing from the dbd file is the Data Type Tokens/defs ... ie where the field data type is stored in the file and how to determine the data length ... as the dat files are fixed length this is all I need to recover all the data.

 

[olded]

OK, I'm assuming we are talking about the Standard Engine and not Turbo/Online. It sounds like you might have the database System Catalogue information. The total Informix documentation is online at:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/informix/pubs/library/

The oldest SE documentation is SE 5. The system cat info is in the Guide to SQL:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/7193a.pdf

It looks like your version is older than SE 5. If the above documentation doesn't help you out, I'd ask your question at the comp.databases.informix newsgroup. I haven't visited there in some time, but they might be able to help you.