By the end of
Resolving In Place Alters, Part 3 I was able to read the raw data pages that belong to the table with pending IPAs, but I wasn't able to see if a data page had a pending IPA or not. In this installment I will show you how I solved that problem using what I know about the Informix Data Page structure and the structure of my table before and after the in place alter was performed.
Anatomy of the Informix Data Page
When Informix stores data on disk, it doesn't just write your row data. It also writes some "housekeeping" data at the beginning of the page and at the end of the page that help the engine to know what actually is stored in this data page.
The first 24 bytes of a page contain the page header with all kinds of information that you're going to have a hard time finding documentation about. The last N bytes of a data page contain a timestamp and the slot table, which you may have better luck finding some documentation on. In between the page header and page footer (slot table + timestamp) you'll find your actual data. We will need information from each of the 3 parts of the data page.