How to connect to a legacy Informix database?

Question

I have to connect my app to a customer's Informix 7.2 legacy database.

From what I was able to find out, in theory there should be a database service running on port 50000. The problem is that I cannot find any database service in the Operative System.

So far I'm only able to use dbaccess and perform queries from the command line.

I would like to use a database driver (such as http://code.google.com/p/ibm-db/) so my app can connect and query the database using a cursor, but since I cannot find any database service, apparently I can't...

Am I missing something here? Are there options I'm not considering?

Is it possible to have an Informix database in which the only interface is dbaccess?

Answer 1

See connection strings for Informix

Answer 2

If you use Python you can look at: Python wiki but I would like to extend it a little.

If you work on Windows and have Client SDK then there should be ODBC driver installed on your machine. There is also Linux and other unix versions of such client software. If you install that you can use ODBC to connect to database. On Windows you can use Active State Python 2.6 with win32 extensions which has odbc module included. On other Python implementations you can use win32 extensions or other ODBC module such as mxODBC.

I work also with Jython where I use both JDBC and ODBC drivers. You can see this "in action" in my SO questions like: Problem with Informix JDBC Money format