Technical Note:
infotrace for IBM Informix® Dynamic Server databases is a standalone product written in ESQL/C and Java, which are both no charge items, meaning that the financial outlay to use infotrace is minimised...Find Out More
Technical Information
Infotrace uses information from the transaction logs and the live instance to re-construct the data that has been changed and provides a trail of changes that have been made to your data; regardless of who has made the change or how the change has been made.
The user simply indicates the table/tables that he/she wants to track and provide the transaction logs that cover the required time period. Infotrace will then create a number of 'shadow' tables in a separate database (either in the same instance or in another instance on the same machine) and populate these tables with the changes.
If data has been deleted then the deleted rows will populate the shadow table(s); if data has been inserted then the inserted rows will populate the shadow table(s) and if data has been updated then the before and after images of the data rows will populate the table(s). In addition to the raw data, Infotrace records information as to who made the changes and when they were made by reference to the start and end times of the transaction. Infotrace will also record statistics on a user by user basis that show how many changes/deletions and inserts each user has made.
This data is available to the user through a Java client that reads and interprets the data and presents it in a clear and easy to use window. The Java client allows you to define and save the connection details to the instance that contains the shadow tables.
This mechanism enables you not only to trace changes to your data and find out who has made the change, but also to put information back that has been changed in error. For example, if somebody accidentally deletes too many rows, then the deleted data can be unloaded to a named file which can then be used to load the data back into the original table using a single SQL statement.
Infotrace is a standalone product. The Infotrace server side product is written in ESQL/C and the client side analysis tool is written in Java.
Infotrace picks up the schema of the table and other information from the live instance and so cannot be used if the live instance is not available. if the table structure has been changed then only transaction logs that have been created after the change can be used to trace the table, although changes recorded in Infotrace prior to the schema change can still be viewed. Most in-built data types are compatible with Infotrace although byte and text types will be translated into null values.