Very old page bug

I am trying to help someone who I think is experiencing the very old page bug. I read some postings in c.d.i archives and I have 3 questions :- (a) When ontape finds that the page has really very old timestamp, it updates the timestamp of that page to latest timestamp. Shouldn't this be done only once (till that page becomes very old again in future). (b) I read that dummy statement update table set colmun1 = column1 is not logged as the engine knows that it is a dummy statement. Is this true? What about buffers. Does dummy update avoid flooding the buffer. (c) Is there a script to find out which page has really old timestamp. This way the table can be identified and update statement issued for only that table. thanks.

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 12:10:48 -0500, rkusenet wrote: > I am trying to help someone who I think is experiencing the very old page > bug. I read some postings in c.d.i archives and I have 3 questions :- > > (a) When ontape finds that the page has really very old timestamp, it > updates the timestamp of that page to latest timestamp. Shouldn't this be > done only once (till that page becomes very old again in future). Yes, but continuing updates and the ever increasing timestamp guarantee that more pages will be 'very old' by the next archive (indeed updating the timestamps on a bunch of old pages during the archive merely causes a 'dog chasing his tail' syndrome until every page that is not actively updated frequently has finally been redated. That's the bug part of this problem, it persists for months and dozens of archives slowing the archives down to a crawl. > (b) I read that dummy statement update table set colmun1 = column1 is not > logged as the engine knows that it is a dummy statement. Is this true? What > about buffers. Does dummy update avoid flooding the buffer. Don't know about that. > (c) Is there a script to find out which page has really old timestamp. This > way the table can be identified and update statement issued for only that > table. No. Tech support has a utility IB. Getting access to it is a problem. Art S. Kagel