Helen,

I read on an Interbase forum that doing a select count(*) from <tablename> performs a GC on that table. Is this true in Firebird?

If I don't do a back/restore, does Firebird reuse the empty data pages for new data? If yes, I suppose that's where the data fragmentation comes from...

So, it look like I'm going to have to do a backup/restore periodically.

All updates and inserts are committed immediately. However, I have a couple of DBGrids that display data from a select query. One of these never closes while the application is running. Is this considered an "uncommitted" transaction?

Thanks for your help,
Dan

-------Original Message-------
From: Helen Borrie <helebor@...>
Sent: 02/28/03 09:04 AM
To: ib-support@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [ib-support] GBAK question

>
> At 08:47 AM 28/02/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>If I run GBAK and include garbage collection in the backup process, is
>this equivalent to running a SWEEP on the live database? In other words,

>does the database being backed up get garbage collected?

Yes. It's still a good idea to resume operations on a restored database
from time to time, as well, to free up space that was left behind by
deleted rows - sort of equivalent to a "database defrag".

>I'm trying to decide whether to schedule a SWEEP or a BACKUP (or both)
>every week on my database...

Sometimes you need both - depends a lot on how efficient your applications

are at moving transactions through to commit (and how stable your network
is and how well-behaved your users are...)

If you can get your gbak frequency right, and you can monitor things so
that you can run a sweep from gfix when needed, you can set the sweep
interval to 0.

heLen




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