At 11:14 AM 14/06/2006, you wrote:

>What do these tmp files do?

For storing the intermediate sets used in ORDER BY, GROUP BY and
DISTINCT queries. Before Fb 1.5, the engine always used the
temporary directories on disk for these sets; from Fb 1.5 on, it
will create these files in RAM if enough is available.

>Would it be advisable to get another hard disk
>just for the Linux OS and Tmp files and then use the RAID for the
>database files.

It doesn't sound too silly, if the applications are very demanding on
sort space. Such things get down to a matter of scale really, don't
they? If there are lots of sorted queries going on simultaneously
and also lots of users, it would seem a must, e.g. make the /var
partition the sole inhabitant of a big, fast drive and point the
TempDirectories there. On a 3-person LAN with fairly primitive
querying, it would seem like overkill.

./heLen