At 05:26 AM 13/09/2005 +0200, Johannes Pretorius wrote:

>Just want to Add this is on Interbase 5.6
>OS types where this happens on is Win NT,XP Professional, Windows 2000
>Server and Advance Server and 2003 Server

Have you checked their Forced Writes setting? It should be ON, no ifs, no
buts.

See more Q's inline below ---

./heLen

>There is enough space on all hard drives

Is there any sort space configured in ibconfig? If not, the Windows c:\tmp
directory will be used - not a good choice, given the amount of hits on
this directory by every dopey app ever written for Windows, including
Internet Explorer and any number of trojans. Not that lack of sort space
should corrupt a database...

>We have a funny error happening lately at our clinets. Some random tables
>Primary key goes corrupt and we get
>the error Cannot sort on column that does not exist. If we do a select *
>from TABLE_A
>
>If we DELETE the Primary key and then RE-CREATE it.. ALL is FINE.. No
>problems anymore.. until next time..
>
>We kinda don't know where to start.. And want to know if somebody else has
>ever ran into this.

With InterBase, don't overlook the Windows path bug. Check the paths in
the connection strings of your apps to make sure they're clean; but also
find out whether anyone at the site is accessing the database with 3rd
party tools that you have no control over. The path bug could be hitting
there. To summarise, InterBase server on Windows will let different
clients connect with different pathstrings (C:\mydata\mydb.gdb and
C:mydata\mydb.gdb) with devastating consequences. Note the missing
backslash after C: in the second example.

If everything seems "clean", do some rigorous housekeeping on the disk
where the database is stored. Do the heavy scandisk to see if you have any
damaged sectors and do a defrag if it is indicated. Intermittent
corruptions are one of the signs of a dying hard disk.

A memory test wouldn't go amiss either. You can download memtest86
(www.memtest86.com) and install a bootable image onto a FD or CDRom. The
tests are OS-independent and very thorough. If there is iffy memory there,
it will find it.

./heLen