Since I began using Firebird, I have kept my transactions (type concurrency) very short and then call COMMIT immediately afterward.  This has worked very well.

I recently had the need to perform more complex processing and what I did was to keep everything short and modular.  But I am now seeing that my design in this specific case was flawed.

I am updating different parts of the same record repeatedly and I believe that this is causing multiple back versions which causing excessive disk write I/O and slowing things down terribly:

a) begin a transaction, update FIELD_1 of MYTABLE, COMMIT, and end transaction.

b) begin a transaction, update FIELD_2 of MYTABLE, COMMIT, and end transaction.

c) begin a transaction, update FIELD_3 of MYTABLE, COMMIT, and end transaction.

d) begin a transaction, update FIELD_4 of MYTABLE, COMMIT, and end transaction.

e) begin a transaction, update FIELD_5 of MYTABLE, COMMIT, and end transaction.

Note: other tables are inserted and updated during during transactions a-e but those tables are not presenting any problems.  The problem is with MYTABLE.

Of course, I normally update all fields in one transaction but in this particular case, determining the contents of each field is a complex process that requires manipulation and analysis of the the data provided by a number of other Firebird SELECT queries to the database.

I am averaging about 300 transactions per minute during this process that may last 12 hours and during that time, things get terribly slow.

So can someone confirm my suspicions, will each of the 5 transactions above to the same row of data cause 5 new 'back versions'?

Like I said, I have always kept transactions very short.  I am thinking of something like this instead:

a) begin a transaction, update FIELD_1 of MYTABLE.

b) update FIELD_2 of MYTABLE.

c) update FIELD_3 of MYTABLE.

d) update FIELD_4 of MYTABLE.

e) update FIELD_5 of MYTABLE, COMMIT, and end transaction.

If something fails anywhere in between, I would ROLLBACK this single transaction.

Keeping my transactions shorter and more modular as above is easier from a development point of view but I have the back version performance issue.  Although the second method means a much longer transaction, I won't have back versions to deal with.  Do you think that this approach would be better?

Thank you

P.S.  Sweeping the database does not help with the performance problem, the only temporary solution to regain performance is to backup using GBAK and restore.