RE: anybody got any dbexport tips for post 1990 tape drives?

Some time back I overlooked the fact that there is a limitation of 2GB when you dbexport to tape as well.I set -s to a value greater than 2GB.But the Dbexport worked OK, dumping about 2GB to each of the tapes.10 GIG went to 5 tapes. (Informix tech support would not support this if there were to be any problems).They advocated doing the dbexport again with the correct -s values. So having dbexported with a value >2GB you may not find support should you run into any problems with the dbimport.Also you need to take into account the fact that Dbimport takes aeons to complete and looks like there isn't much one could possibly do to speed it up. Nevertheless,I am not able to figure out the calculation behind the "1650065408". Sathish Sadagopan -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Gallagher [mailto:andrew@mail.gdbc.gov.bc.ca] Sent: Friday, April 30, 1999 12:33 AM To: informix-list@iiug.org Subject: anybody got any dbexport tips for post 1990 tape drives? Hello, We are running IUS 9.14.UC5 on an Ultra II running solaris 2.5.1. We discovered, while running "oncheck -ce" that, while validating extents for Space 'rootdb' the error "ERROR:Missing pages between 87 and 99" popped up. The 13 other spaces reported no errors. Informix support recommended doing a dbexport of each database in the instance (2 in our case), reinitializing the instance, and then running dbimport. We have 5 x 1.9 Gb raw partitions assigned to this instance and an onarchive produces about 3.5 x 1.9Gb .sav files. I tried to run the dbexport to a file but I ran into the 2Gb limit for disk exports. I am trying to run the dbexport to a Sun DLT 4000 (20Gb native/ 40 Gb compressed) so I tried the following command (with a type IV tape loaded): dbexport -ss -t /dev/rmt/0 -b 64 -s 20000000 -f /ius_temp/prodexport/twa.imptwa and received the error "tape size must be greater than block size" I checked the command carefully and re-read the section in the manual but I don't understand what is going on. I thought it must be a variable overrun where 20,000,000 is too large and ends up looking like a negative number or zero... so I cut the size in half and tried dbexport -ss -t /dev/rmt/0 -b 64 -s 10000000 -f /ius_temp/prodexport/twa.imptwa and the export started to work... Well, I've just inserted my 9th tape. I cannot believe the 7 Gb of data has expanded to 80+ Gb!!! Here is the output of the last hour and one half. This tape is tape number 6 in this export sequence. Please label the tape. Please mount the next tape and press return ... { DATABASE twa tape# 7 delimiter | block size 65536 tape size 1650065408} This tape is tape number 7 in this export sequence. Please label the tape. Please mount the next tape and press return ... { DATABASE twa tape# 8 delimiter | block size 65536 tape size 1650065408} This tape is tape number 8 in this export sequence. Please label the tape. Please mount the next tape and press return ... { DATABASE twa tape# 9 delimiter | block size 65536 tape size 1650065408} The block size looks correct but what is with the 1,650,065,408? Is everything in informix limited to under 2Gb? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this. Andrew Gallagher 250-387-1146 andrew@mail.gdbc.gov.bc.ca