I have an FB 2.1.2 classic installation running a 70GB database with
the sweep interval set to 0 that runs gbak every night. I just
discovered last week that gbak was being run without garbage
collection (-g), probably to speed up the backup process. This led to
a gap between OAT and OIT that was just huge.



I successfully ran gbak with garbage collection (that took 48 hours).
However, the transaction stats on the database do not seem to have
been cleared up:



Database header page information:

Flags 0

Checksum 12345

Generation 24601590

Page size 8192

ODS version 11.1

Oldest transaction 12778

Oldest active 24126761

Oldest snapshot 24126761

Next transaction 24152614

Bumped transaction 1

Sequence number 0

Next attachment ID 448968

Implementation ID 16

Shadow count 0

Page buffers 2048

Next header page 0

Database dialect 1

Creation date May 2, 2009 22:22:39

Attributes force write, no reserve



Variable header data:

Sweep interval: 0

*END*



My understanding was that I do not need to run a manual sweep if I am
running gbak each night (with garbage collection enabled, of course).
The question is, do I need to run a sweep on this DB, or is there
something else that is preventing the OIT from advancing?



The server has been rebooted a number of times since the database was
last restored from a backup (which occurred more than a year ago). It
is difficult to find a maintenance window with this size database to
do a full backup/restore cycle, so I'm looking for any other
alternative to keep this healthy.



Thank you for your advice,



Bob M..





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]