Contrary to most of the developers beliefs, firebird can be crashed quite
easily. It happens quite often here, usually reproducable to some degree, when
you do something "off the wall". In our case, usually when one of my coworkers
is playing with some obscure DB widgets. Maybe there was too much "The user
should never do this, so scew handling it". I dont know. Hell, I wrote an
application that just randomly starts connecting/disconnecting/throwing crap at
the firebird server and it crashes.

Jason

>
>
> Well, the database where I removed the external file approximately at
> the time of crashing was originally created on the other server and
> then migrated (through some hassles, due to the external file and
> having sat ExternalFileAccess=NONE (or similar). I think it was done
> through backup/restore, but Aage's memory is normally better than
> mine.
>
> Moreover, the crashing server runs Firebird 1.5.2 and is in use all
> the time, the non-crashing server runs Firebird 1.5.1 and is
> occasionally used for testing purposes, but mostly runs other
> software. The simple test I used, only created one external table with
> one field (in another database that already had a table that I left
> untouched), when the crash occured I modified an empty table with
> possibly 100 fields that had contained possibly around 1000000 records
> before being emptied. The database itself contains about 12000000 in a
> couple of tables (views are also defined, though I don't think I've
> tried using views over the external table ;o) if I remember correctly.
>
> Now, I don't know whether I actually crashed the server, I actually
> never noticed that the server went down before Aage told me. I just
> know that I three minutes after the crash sent Aage a mail telling
> that I had removed the external table and just concluded that I'd
> probably done that at the time of crashing. Of course others may have
> caused the crash as well, I am just more suspicious about my behaviour
> since I know it must have happened within three minutes before or
> after the crash and that I did something I'd never done before,
> whereas our coders have been using Aages program for several years
> without crashing anything. Also, I noticed that Firebird Workbench
> didn't allow me to remove the external table declaration - and thought
> that maybe Martijn had been made aware of some potential error and
> tried to prevent his users from making a mistake, something I
> circumvented through using IB_SQL.
>