Hi,

At September 6, 2004, 15:23, m2data wrote:

> What is the world comming to?

> Here is a little story:

> We have around 120 servers around the contry running FB1.0.3. One day
> one of our customers called us, telling me that his hardware vendor
> (lets call him mr. overkill) had just reformatet the main disk,
> because Firebird was running at 99% and Ctrl+Alt+Del didn't work. Mr.
> overkill cut the power, but the server wouldn't start again, so he
> didn't have any other choice then to format the disk.

First of all, I wouldn't trust anyone that would format a hard-drive
at the first hurdle like this, and has the potential for the customer
to loose important data(someone could argue that a backup should have
been performed the day before, but what if the data in question has
only been entered that day). Windows has a repair on its install disk,
just in case it doesn't want start-up again. I've used this
functionality without loosing data, and reformatting the hard-drive.

> But (and here comes the funny part) before that, he managed to get a
> dump, that he send to MICROSOFT and MS told him that Firebird was not
> CERTIFIED for Windows 2003 and that he should avoid reinstalling
> Firebird. Mr. overkill passed this on to our customer, and then the
> customer called me, saying that he had to choose a system using a
> CERTIFIED database.

Then the list might be very small, since the only RDBMS of Firebird's
caliber that is Windows 2003 certified is MS-SQL 2003.

> SO...Please...could someone get my beloved Firebird CERTIFIED :-).

First the cost is around US$35,000, for server applications(that's
what I found, but I could be wrong, although the testing is made by a
company other than Microsoft). So, the question would be, would you
prefer that the developers that are paid to continue the development
or put the development on hold, so that FB can get certified for
Windows servers. Also, I checked which other RDBMS that is not
certified, and you probably would be pleased to find out that Oracle
is not certified for Win2000/2003, and that DB2 is not certified for
Win2003. And, these are just 2 that are not certified, if you want to
see what is actually certified, take a look at:
http://cert.veritest.com/CfWreports/server/

I don't think that an application needs to be certified for Windows,
for someone to install it. Ours isn't. Also, you have to remember that
there are some technicians and consultants that will only deal with
Microsoft certified applications(or even just Microsoft products).
And, if they don't know the product that they are dealing with, they
would simply prefer to get rid of it and install something that they
know. Although the product is what the customer has chosen.

> As a sidenote: I have seen the "99% problem" a number of times in this
> group, but never a good reason to why this is happening!? Our database
> (please don't laugth) have no events, no constrains, no FK's, no
> Views, no external functions. Only Tables, Generators, Indices, 3
> triggers, 1 (yes one) procedure and we are calling gds32/fbclient
> directly.

The reasons for this happening can be numerous. But, most often it
seems to be related to the garbage collection thread kicking in, when
there has been a large update or delete. And, that it's trying to get
rid of all of the garbage.

--
Best regards,
Daniel Rail
Senior System Engineer
ACCRA Group Inc. (www.accra.ca)
ACCRA Med Software Inc. (www.filopto.com)