Dear Helen,

Thank you so much for your input and helping me breathe.

It's been going on for nearly 30 hrs now, I'll let it go for hopefully another 2 days before I start to panic again ...

I have no intention of restoring the database from the backup. The total purpose of the normal sweep, backup and restore was to do some database housekeeping. In my case to simply delete 'garbage' that's in my database. The garbage that is built up has the effect of causing the DB to slow down and be unresponsive. When I first encountered this (about 9 mths ago), I was advised by you and others

If you really don't understand how to do good transaction management in your client code then you *will* need to fall back on housekeeping to deal with the resulting garbage. I would suggest getting all connections off-line once a week and doing a sweep. Then, once a month (at worst), you should do a backup. As long as you are doing the weekly sweep, you could make your backups with the -g switch (which will suppress the gbak -b normal behaviour of performing garbage collection).

So, that's what I have been doing and everything has been running smooth until this time when I decided to delete some data from 1 table (approx. 70Million records ...)

Once again thank you Helen and friends !

Theodore


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