No Free Disk space left for Sort

[logixhel]

Has anyone else come into contact with this message when running an impromptu query. Although it looks like a simple message to start with, we do not have any disk space issues, and we are not actually sorting any records. We do however wish to report on a large quantity of data.
Any help or ideas would be great.

 

[griffindm]

I haven't seen this before, other than truly not having enough local temp space or having that space fragmented. I do not see this exact error message in the Cognos Knowledgebase. Is this the exact text of the message, or is the something prefixing or appending it?

Dave Griffin

 

[logixhel]

Hi Dave
The actual message is as follows:
ISAM error: no free disk space for sort
On selecting Details:
Error number -239
DMS-E-GENERAL A general exception has occurred during asynchronous open.
Cannot sort rows
ISAM error: no free disk space available for sort.

One thing we have both on our UNIX machine (we have a n informix link) and our PC is loads of disk space. The other thing is I have not actually elected to group records together or sort them.
Any suggestions would be welcome.

 

[griffindm]

logixhel,

Looks like its an error on the database server, not your workstation. Check with your DBA. Cognos says the following about this error:

Description:
When trying to run a complex report against an Informix database, the driver is returning the following error message:
Error 237 ISAM no free disk space

Solution:
This error message is coming from the ISAM file system (ISAM typically resides in a unix environment)on the server, indicating that it does not have enough free disk space to complete the request from the Informix database. The database has run out of disk space. A cut and paste of the query into another ISQL will confirm this.

Hope this helps,

Dave Griffin

 

[logixhel]

Dave
Did you mean 237 or 239 ?
I have checked the disk space on our Unix machine and we have more space there than I think this company will ever need !
Also when the query runs, if I check the space used on the Unix machine I can't establish even which partition is being used as there appears to be no effect on the machine whatsoever.
Help.........................

 

[griffindm]

logixhel,

I know the message you had was 239 not 237, but there is often a relationship between similar messages, and the 239 error with the same message did not seem to had a hit. The problem is probably not GENERAL free space on the Unix server, but could rather be the pre-allocated space within the Informix database itself. Most RDBMS systems do not dynamically grab additional tempDB space for their databases. You have to allocate the space in advance. So it is quite possible that you may have tons of free space on the Unix box, but still be out of space in the tempDB area of your Informix database. You would not see additional disk space being consumed on the Unix box as the query runs because the OS already considers the space used due to the pre-allocation step mentioned above. If you do not see a processor load (CPU use) on the Unix box, either you've got a simple query, a massive Unix box, or you may be looking at the wrong box (<g>).

I'm not certain this is your situation, but I would definitely check it out with your DBA. It this is not the problem, consider logging a call to Cognos support. If you have a support id you can do this on the web at

http://support.cognos.com.

Hope this helps.

Dave Griffin

 

[logixhel]

Thanks Dave
I'll look into this and let you know the outcome.

 

[logixhel]

Hi Dave
I have finally found the cause of our problems, with a lot of your help, so thanks very much. It turns out that the space issue is within the page size of the tempdbs portion of informix itself. Now all I have to do is find out how to increase it on Informix Online.
Regards
Helen

 

[griffindm]

Helen,

Glad to be of assistance.

Dave Griffin