Subject RE: [firebird-support] Help With External Table Issue
Author Edward Mendez
Post date 2014-09-11T23:13:51Z

Hi All,

 

I think I found out why I am having the problem.

 

I found release notes on Firebird 2.5 and saw this following…

 

Large External Table Support Enabled

Vlad Khorsun

Previous Firebird versions used 32-bit I/O when working with external tables, limiting the size of the external

file to < 2 GB. The mechanism has been enhanced to use 64-bit I/O on filesystems that support it, effectively

eliminating the 2 GB limit.

Tracker reference CORE-2492.

 

So I am guessing that even though FB 2.1.4 DB is 64bit architecture, it is still using the 32 bit I/O for external Tables.

 

I was able to verify that this works well in FB 2.5.3.

 

Thanks,

 

Ed Mendez

 

From: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com [mailto:firebird-support@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2014 5:51 PM
To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [firebird-support] Help With External Table Issue

 

 

Hello All,

 

We have a Firebird 2.1.4 running on CentOS 5.5

 

I am having a problem trying to insert data into an External Table and then read it back.

 

Here is out output from fbsvcmgr;

fbsvcmgr service_mgr -user sysdba -password masterke  -info_server_version -info_implementation

Server version: LI-V2.1.3.18185 Firebird 2.1

Server implementation: Firebird/linux AMD64

 

And from uname –a

Linux <hostname>  2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 #1 SMP Thu May 13 13:08:30 EDT 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

 

So it looks like I have 64 bit OS and 64 bit Firebird install

 

I have an external table definition of about 176 fields in this particular external table. 88 real fields and 88 additional fields used to track NULL status for each field.

 

I am populating the table as so…

 

INSERT INTO EXT_TABLE ( Field1, field2, field3…)

Select Field1, field2, field3… FROM SRC_TABLE;

 

 

There should be about 1.4 Million rows written out to the External Table.

The weird thing is that my insert statement completes successfully. I get no Errors.

But when I try to do an select count(*) on the external table it bombs with the following error message.

Unsuccessful execution caused by a system error the precludes successful execution of subsequent statements.

I/O error for file “@2”.

Error while trying to open file.

Invalid Argument.

 

On the Linux server it wrote out a file about 4.3 GBs.

 

If I do a select count(*) it bombs, but if loop via the FOR SELECT and add a WHEN ANY CLAUSE I get a count of about 667,000 row count.

 

I saw documentation for External Tables being 2GB for 32bit implementations, but the I can’t find one for firebird 2.1.4 - 64bit.

 

Maybe I might be hitting a Linux Limitation, but our FIREBIRD Database on this same server is 240GB.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

 

Ed Mendez