>
> A> Do not hear me say that Firebird can't handle
> A> huge databases (certainly gbak would take forever)
>
> I have 42 Gb FB database (1.5.2 CS under SuSE), and gbak finishes
> it's daily job in less than 40 minutes... I think that's pretty good
> time.

Hello Fikret,

That is quite impressive actually, I wouldn't have expected it to run
that quick on that much data. One of the problems though is that is 40
minutes of quite high disk activity in addition to the disk activity
of normal use. The further complicate things, if garbage collection is
enabled during gbak (which it is unless you explicitly disable it),
and you have foreign keys with poor selectivity, then the garbage
collection can cause the CPU to be sitting on 100% for much of the time.

Obviously if no-one is using it overnight, you could close all
connections, shut down the service and take a file system copy
significantly quicker.

Also, archival type databases would tend to build up garbage as
garbage left to the cooperative gc would rarely be encountered by a
select.

It is worth noting though that Firebird 2 addresses both of these gbak
weaknesses. The new indexing structure means that indexes with lots of
duplicates wont slow the garbage collection process anywhere near as
much, and incremental backups are coming ;)

So I imagine your backup will run significantly quicker come FB2.

Adam