Creating a temporary dbspace

To specify where to allocate the temporary files, create temporary dbspaces.

To define temporary dbspaces:

  1. Use the onspaces utility with the -c -d -t options.

    For more information, see Creating a dbspace that uses the default page size.

    Or, use the create tempdbspace command with the SQL administration API admin() or task() function.

    For more information, see create tempdbspace argument: Create a temporary dbspace (SQL administration API).

  2. Use the DBSPACETEMP environment variables or the DBSPACETEMP configuration parameter to specify the dbspaces that the database server can use for temporary storage.

    The DBSPACETEMP configuration parameter can contain dbspaces with a mix of page sizes.

    For further information about DBSPACETEMP, see the topics about configuration parameters in the IBM® Informix® Administrator's Reference.

  3. If you create more than one temporary dbspace, the dbspaces should be located on separate disks to optimize the I/O.

After you have created a temporary dbspace, you must make the database server aware of the existence of the newly created temporary dbspace by setting the DBSPACETEMP configuration parameter, the DBSPACETEMP environment variable, or both.

The following example shows how to create 5-megabyte temporary dbspace named temp_space with an offset of 5000 KB:
onspaces -c -t -d temp_space -p /dev/raw_dev1 -o 5000 -s 5120
The equivalent SQL administration API statement:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task(“create tempdbspace”, “temp_space”, “/dev/raw_dev1”, “5 MB”, “5000 KB”);
By allocating the space from a pre-defined storage pool you may avoid specifying the device or offset:
EXECUTE FUNCTION task(“create tempdbspace from storagepool”, “temp_space”, “5 MB”);

For more information, see Temporary dbspaces.