Hi,

I am trying to make two  inactive alternate indices on a large table active=

and receiving the message "Sort Error: Out of Memory" each time I try to
set either one active.

The ALTER INDEX ... ACTIVE command runs for about an hour and fails with th=
e
above error leaving a temp file of about 650 MB. I've set

TMP_DIRECTORY 5000000000 "D:\TEMP\"

in ibconfig, and am using Firebird 1.0 on a Pentium IV with about 100MB swa=
p
on C:,  600MB swap on D:  and 8-9 GB spare on D:.

I'm aware that the indices are probably as large as the table itself, but =

the table is re-filled once every three months and then many SELECT queries=

are run against it, so the process has been working well. I'd like to stick=

with it until I can re-design the database to tokenize the data.

The table has 6 milion rows and it's structure and indices are as follows: =


FORMAT_ID                       INTEGER Not Null
CUSTOMER_ID                     INTEGER Not Null
SURNAME                         VARCHAR(100) CHARACTER SET WIN1252 Nullable=

FORENAMES                       VARCHAR(100) CHARACTER SET WIN1252 Nullable=

CONSTRAINT PK_TEMP_CUSTOMERS:
  Primary key (CUSTOMER_ID, FORMAT_ID)

AI_CUST_FORENAMES_SURNAME INDEX ON
TEMP_CUSTOMERS(FORENAMES, SURNAME)
AI_CUST_SURNAME_FORENAMES INDEX ON TEMP_CUSTOMERS(SURNAME,
FORENAMES)
RDB$PRIMARY22 UNIQUE INDEX ON TEMP_CUSTOMERS(CUSTOMER_ID,
FORMAT_ID)

I'd be grateful for any suggestions on how I can remedy this 'cos I'm at my=

wit's end trying to find a solution.

Thanks,
Jon.