> There certainly are larger ones. A few years back one poster had a

200GB

> IB database, and an almost-1GB database (IB) has been mentioned.

That should read almost *1TB* database -- the size quoted was 980GB.

Further, Nickolay Samofatov (here in my office) has experience with
numerous database of 9-20GB and has seen test cases of databases as
large as 100GB.

> It should be quite easy now (that Fb is faster, gbak is faster and
> hardware is faster) to have pretty large databases running.

Unfortunately, GBAK is not practical for large databases (the actual
size will vary according to mileage). The backup is not so much the
problem, although that can be a problem, it is the speed/approach of the
restore. A restore which takes 24+ hours to perform has limited value
for most businesses when they experience problems.

These speed issues were the reason why I/BroadView Software commissioned
the new NBackup function. It performs backups at database page level,
not data level. Thus, you can perform backups/restores at near hardware
speeds as well as perform incremental backups.

This new function is available today in the HEAD branch (i.e. non
v1.5.x) of the Firebird code


Sean