At 11:40 AM 4/26/00 -0700, Markus Kemper wrote:

>
> > I don't understand your reference to a "virtual backup",
> > please expand. How would it work for multi-file DB's?
>
> Funny you ask. This little trick was shown to me by (Bill
> Karwin, I believe) during the InterBase 4.0 timeframe. It
> was a workaround for a customer issue hitting a larger
> than 2GB 'backup' file size limit on AIX or HP (I forget).
>
> mknod gpipe
> gbak -c gpipe new_db_f1.gdb 20000 new_db_f2.gdb 20000 ... &
> gbak -b old_db_f1.gdb old_db_f2.gdb ... gpipe
>
> The trick avoids the creating of the backup file and the
> file size limit by writing to the pipe and reading from it
> at the same time.
>

Yuck.

Would a better solution be a mechanism to create and
detach a shadowed copy? Unlike the gbak case it would
be a complete usable copy.



Jim Starkey