> Nothing has changed. Gbak still does GC unless you tell it not to.

OK. No problem.
But is the hanging of gbak with GC considered a bug? And if so, is
anyone working on this issue?

> Fb 2.0 *does* make cooperative GC available to Superserver, which
> might help you to plan your post-delete cleanups a bit more
> easily. But you do have to get rid of the garbage by some means.

Could you please explain "cooperative GC"?
And is it already available in FB 1.5 classic?

> To turn that around - if you are planning to restore the DB after
> backing it up, don't do GC in the backup! Disable GC using the -g

switch.

Sounds... uh... strange.
What's a backup's use if never being restored ;-)

But seriously, what is the suggested way to do a massive delete on a
(fairly large = 8 GB) database?
Obviously you have to do something because it might corrupt the
database otherwise.
One of our customers corrupted their database twice. And each time
they did a massive delete before without a backup/restore. So that's
what I suggested to do, a backup without GC and a restore afterwards.

--Heiko