> You can't do what you wish by server configuration,
> what will almost do it is to commit every transaction
> immediately. Every SQL statement would be immediately
> followed by a commit. You may be able to get the same
> effect by defining the connection, that's not an area
> I known well enough to comment on.

I did the COMMIT RETAIN right after I did the UPDATE command. I know
that that Firebird has some kind of record delta mechanism. For some
reasons and under some circumstances, it's a great feature of Firebird.
But, for other reasons and circumstances, it can be a very bad one as
well. And the worse is, it has a very bad impact to the performance. The
bigger the file size, the slower the database responses.

For example in system I currently build. My application clients can do
UPDATE command almost every second. And only in a few hours, my database
file can grow more than 1000% from its original size. With the initial
file size, it took about 6 minutes to update 50.000 records. But, on the
second update process with the same amount of records, it took almost 13
minutes!

My sistem does not need such record delta mechanism, though I may still
need it in other time in other system. It'd be better if that feature is
customizable, put it somewhere in the configuration file. So, I can
decide whether I want to use it or not.

Firebird is a great database system with rich features. Though I'm a
newbie with it, I already love it. But, this problem which I think it
should be easy to solve, seems too complicated to be done. Maybe, this
can be a wish list from me to the Firebird developers, though I can't
help with the code perhaps I still able to help with suggestions.

> Gbak is for taking backups of your database in a
> controlled and consistant way, copying the file at
> the operating system level can give you a broken
> database.

For now, run gbak periodically is the only solution to overcome this
problem.

Regards,

-Bee-



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