Re: Is Informix Reliable?

David Williams wrote: > > In article <6ajuq7$8lv@cssun.mathcs.emory.edu>, Billy Wheeler > <billy@west.co.za> writes > >My favourite SE story was when I walked into a cellular service > >provider who was complaining about bad month-end run performance on > >their multi-gigabyte (+-30GB) database. I had my copy of the OnLine 7 > >performance tuning guide in my briefcase and ready to rock. Imagine > >my surprise when I found out they weren't running OnLine anything! > >And they had individual .dat and .idx files in excess if 1GB... > > > >What is a recurring problem, in my experience, is index corruption; > >however, bcheck has always fixed this. It's also generally easy to > >spot! :-) > > > > Tell me about it! We have a customer with a 1.5Gb standard engine > database and tables >500Mb! > > Award of the day goes to a certain site. Managed to lose files > at random when rebooting and fsck'ing a partition containing an SE > database AND NEVER TOLD US. Eventually they lost the main table for > their database with 1000's of records. Of course they have a backup? > > NOOO! xGb of files does not fit on a <xGb tape! Guess what? For > several months no-one checked the backups were working!! > > They have plenty of things on the tape EXCEPT their database. They are > now going to have to reenter most the fields for several 10,000's > records by hand!! > > And we send data from each record to another system which has it's own > reference for each record. Of course the other system never sees our > reference so even though we can recover some fields of this monster > table from an audit table they will have to match up probably > >50,000 partial records from our system with the other system which > includes invoice and accounting information!!]. FUN!!! > Any way to verify that an Informix backup is valid? It seems to be quite cryptic. John Carlson Informix DBA WH Smith, Inc.