IMS v0.1.2-pilot

The first public release of Informix Management Studio — a Windows desktop
application for working with IBM Informix, in the sense that SQL Server
Management Studio is one for SQL Server.

Informix has no equivalent today: SQL goes through dbaccess, object
definitions through dbschema, and generic JDBC clients treat Informix as a
lowest-common-denominator target. IMS puts connecting, browsing and querying
into one window.

This is a pilot build: early, unsupported, and provided as-is. Read the
limitations below before pointing it at anything you care about.

What it does

• Connections. Described entirely by their own settings rather than the
  machine's sqlhosts, so a connection that works on your workstation works
  the same on someone else's — though existing sqlhosts entries can be
  imported from either the registry or the file. Passwords go to Windows
  Credential Manager, never to a configuration file and never to a log. Every
  connection carries a Development / UAT / Production label, shown beside it at
  all times, so a production server cannot be mistaken for anything else.
• Object browser. Tables, views, synonyms, sequences, procedures, functions
  and indexes, grouped by owner and loaded on demand — opening a large schema
  does not stall on the catalogue. A detail pane gives columns, types,
  nullability, indexes, constraints, triggers, row count, dbspace, lock mode
  and fragmentation, and can script DDL into a new tab.
• SQL editor. Informix SQL and SPL highlighting, context-aware completion
  over the catalogue, execution of a whole script or just the selection, and
  multi-statement runs that identify the failing statement. Transaction state
  is shown at all times, with explicit commit and rollback. UPDATE or
  DELETE with no WHERE warns first.
• Results. Streamed and paged 500 rows at a time rather than buffered, with
  per-column sort, NULL shown as italic (null) rather than by colour alone,
  and export to CSV, tab-delimited, JSON and Excel.
• Query history, searchable, with target, timing, row count and outcome.
• Built-in help. Help → Contents, or F1 from anywhere including the editor.

Limitations worth knowing

• Cancelling a running statement does not work. Alt+Break returns control
  to you, but the statement keeps running on the server until it finishes. The
  session survives, and no data is at risk — but the gesture is currently worse
  than its absence, because nothing tells you the work is still going. Measured
  against 14.10: the ODBC driver does not implement the asynchronous execution
  this needs. Fixing it needs a design decision, not just code.
• No session monitor yet. Seeing what the server is doing — sessions,
  locks, blocked sessions — is the fourth planned capability and is not
  started. Use onstat for now.
• User-defined types do not appear in the object tree. Everything else
  lists correctly.
• Informix 14.10 only. That is what it was built and verified against.
  12.10 is untested rather than refused: IMS detects capabilities instead of
  branching on version, so it may work and should degrade rather than fail —
  but nothing about it has been checked.
• Encrypted connections and SSH tunnelling are not built.

What it will not do

IMS performs no administrative change of its own. Every statement it sends is
one you typed or explicitly requested. What you may do is decided by your
Informix privileges, not by IMS — it grants no capability you do not already
hold, and there is no shared or service account behind it. Terminating a
session is deliberately excluded.

It emits no telemetry of any kind. That is enforced by a test that fails the
build if a telemetry package enters the dependency graph, rather than by
intention alone.

Those constraints are what make it reasonable to point at a production server
and to hand to a colleague.

Installing

Unzip and run Ims.exe. No installer and no administrator rights — the .NET
runtime is included in the folder (~183 MB unpacked).

The IBM Informix Client SDK is a prerequisite and is not bundled: IMS
claims no right to redistribute IBM client libraries. Install it separately,
with the IBM INFORMIX ODBC DRIVER (64-bit) registered. Developed against CSDK
4.10.FC1DE.

If the SDK is missing or misconfigured, IMS tells you at startup in a window
that explains what is wrong, rather than failing later as an unexplained
connection error. Help → About shows the detected SDK version, INFORMIXDIR
and ODBC driver name — the first three values to check when something will not
connect, along with the exact commit the build came from.

Requires Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. The 64-bit driver is a requirement, not a
preference: a 64-bit process cannot load the 32-bit Informix ODBC driver.

Your open editor tabs are autosaved and restored at the next start. Logs go to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\IMS\logs, with credentials and result data redacted.

Status

IMPLEMENTATION-TODO.md records exactly what is
and is not built, item by item, and is the honest account — this list is a
summary of it.

Licensed under Apache-2.0. Copyright 2026 Kaveh Shahbazi. The IBM
Informix Client SDK is not covered by that licence and is not redistributed
here. Informix is a trademark of IBM; IMS is not affiliated with or endorsed by
IBM.