Board index » delphi » IB 7.5 and external drive arrays

2005-05-12 10:04:26 PM
delphi163
I'm no hardware / server expert so I'd appreciate some advice.
IB7.1 / 7.5 Win2k server
One of my customers has a large database, and for performance reasons
they want to do a backup / restore cycle every night so that users who
are running demanding reports on the system can run these from another
IB server albeit on yesterdays data. The GBK file comes out at about
40GB and my customer is suggesting using an SCSI external drive array
for the GBK file that will be shared by the 2 IB servers. Aside from the
obvious problem of both servers attempting to access the GBK
simultaneously, is there any reason why this wouldn't work from IB's
perspective ?
 

If you plan to backup using the services API then the external drive
array must appear to be a local drive on the IB server. Although I have
never tried it, I assume that using gbak will work even if the external
drive array does not appear to be a local drive.
--
Bill Todd (TeamB)
 

SimonW writes:
Would a server with replicated data be better?
--
Aage J.
 

Hi Aage.
Have you tried to restore from the GBK file? You should time how long it
takes.
I currently monitor a ~5GB GBK backup process. It takes us about 40mins to
create the GBK file on an old PIII server though I have heard that it can take
as little as 10mins to do it. I have also been able to create a GBK file in
7mins from a 4+GB GDB file on a P4 system though I think it was the server
settings which improved the speed.
Restoring the database from one GBK file should not pose too much of a
problem. If both IB servers are restoring from it at the same time (not
ideal) they both _should_ only be reading it.
A replicated server would be good however you will still need to perform
backups.
~ William O.
"Aage Johansen" <XXXX@XXXXX.COM>writes

William O. writes:
isn't a big issue as it will be done over night when there are no active
users on the reporting server
reworking with regard to triggers and generators to get this working
properly. My customer wants a quick solution.

Aage Johansen writes:
Replication an option in the future but database needs some reworking.
It was never designed with replication in mind and there are issues with
generators / triggers. Looking in b.p.i.replication, I see little
posting activity - how many people are out there successfully
implementing replication ?
 

SimonW writes:
oldish 900MHz Xeon (with fast disks). Data is restored quickly, but
building indexes goes on and on. This is the reason I asked.
Moving to 3.0GHz shortly...
painless to set up (easy to say - never having used replication himself!)
--
Aage J.
 

Aage Johansen writes:
at all so the comparison isn't valid.
--
Aage J.
 

7.5 should be considerably faster since it does not validate all of the
data during the restore.
--
Bill Todd (TeamB)