I also learned quickly to switch off forced writes when populating a
db under Windows. This way I built a five-field, million-record in
20 minutes instead of what projected to be a few hours.

As Stephen points out, there is no risk in doing this when the db
involved is outside the production cycle (and he states clearly that
he would not force-writes-off with an active db). File cache is
there to speed up I/O. When you are populating a bare db, the
advantage of quartering the time involved outweighs the risk of
having to repeat the process due to system failure, IMHO.

Regards,
Andrew Ferguson

--- In ib-support@y..., Helen Borrie <helebor@t...> wrote:
> At 04:19 PM 09-04-02 +0000, Stephen Boyd wrote:
> >I only do this to populate virgin databases and then turn the
forced
> >writes back on when the load is finished. If the system crashes
> >during the load, big deal, I just reload the database.
>
> So you think having a quarter of a million records accumulating in
memory
> isn't "counter-intuitive" to performance?
>
> --HB
>
>
> All for Open and Open for All
> Firebird Open SQL Database · http://firebirdsql.org ·
> http://users.tpg.com.au/helebor/
> _______________________________________________________