Hello,

This problem was mentioned ealier this year.
I have big database (over 2GB) with only one simple table running on Win XP
Home ,Firebird 1.0 server WI-V6.2.794 version of gbak. Database is OK
verified with gfix -validate.

create table programs(
id smallint,
program varchar(30),
description varchar(50),
size varchar(10),
cathegory varchar(10));

populated with almost the same data in each record (about 20 records are
different)

backup this database without G option like :
gbak -b -t -v d:\test.fdb d:\test.bak

hangs gbak about 800000 row and server memory usage grows to 125 MB.
but when using :
gbak -b -t -v -g d:\test.fdb d:\test.bak

all works fine.

I know that such database is something unusual in normal production but I'm
surprised becouse I didn't deleted any single record so garbage collection
would not be important in that case.
I'm wondering what about production database that's why these so these
questions:

1 . Can this happen in good performed production database just becouse is
huge ?
2 . Is it a bug or just becouse database is bad constructed ?
3. How reliable gbak is ? Is there a procedure to test if backup is reliable
,
some of course different that just restore (this is too time consuming)
4.Which are the advantages gbak has over simple SQL copy data and metadata ?
(I saw "dump" or "copy" method in other databases which use simple ,plain
text to backup database metadata and data (through select * from TABLE or
copy TABLE to filename).)
5 .And the last (a little off topic) question about gbak : why backup is
named
"compressed" ? I don't see any compression in backup files ,I can even
compress them with rar or zip to very small sizes.


Best Regards
Bogusław Brandys