If you were to install the Cognos Express Business Intelligence and planning application you probably won't notice Informix Dynamic Server being installed as its default embedded content store at the same time. Under the covers Cognos Express uses the Informix Deployment Utility (DU) to silently and rapidly deploy a pre-configured IDS instance.

 

In IDS 11.50.xC6 this technology is available as part of the product for all platforms. The basic concept behind DU is that you set up your Informix instance on one machine. Configure it, create and populate databases if required, and then copy your Informix directory and dbspaces and bundle it with your application. Your application can then silently deploy the pre-configured instance to any machines it installs on by calling DU (the executable is called ifxdeploy). At deployment time DU will unzip the instance, create the informix user, set file permissions, set any instance specific settings for the machine such as the instance name, listening port etc., and optionally relocate data chunks, so if your application deploys pre-configured dbspaces in a new directory the root space will be updated to reflect the new location of chunks.

 

To help get started with the Deployment Utility, Informix enablement consultant Sreeni Paida has published a new developerWorks article: