Logging and Nonlogging Tables

Data warehousing and similar applications that involve very large amounts of data and few or no inserts, updates, or deletes often need a mix of logged and nonlogged tables within the same database. Extended Parallel Server supports both logging and nonlogging tables. These tables can be permanent or temporary.

STANDARD, OPERATIONAL, and TEMP tables are logging tables while STATIC, RAW, and SCRATCH tables are nonlogging tables. The following are some guidelines for choosing a table type:

• Choose STANDARD tables for OLTP operations.
• Choose OPERATIONAL tables when loading data from another database, or if you need to log transactions but do not care about restorability.
• Choose STATIC tables for data that rarely changes.
• Choose RAW tables when loading data from external tables.
• Choose temporary tables to reduce sorting scope, select an ordered subset of table rows, or to copy tables.

  Whether you use SCRATCH or TEMP tables depends on whether you need logging. If you do not need to rollback data in temporary tables, you can achieve maximum performance by using SCRATCH tables in temporary dbspaces.

For more information on the different table types, see Table Types and your IBM Informix: Performance Guide.

To switch from one table type to another, use the ALTER TABLE command. For more information, refer to the IBM Informix: Guide to SQL Syntax and Modifying the Table-Logging Status.